scoring weirdness

[lalatan]

Earlier today I played BAREHEADEDNESSES (first time I played it) for 30 pts. I entered the singular 3X and 3X it was invalid.

[dannyb]

That is a crazy one.

[Spike1007]

I'm pretty sure that I've run across that before with other words, although I don't really recall them now. (Of course that's weirder than allowing the singular but not the plural, which we know happens.) I've also run across words that don't work (no matter how many times I type them) until I add some prefix or something. You have my sympathies.

I'm pretty sure I've had BAREHEADEDNESSESS before, but didn't even try without the -ES, since it wouldn't have been enough points.

I did get CONSTITUTIONALIZATION(S) yesterday. I also got CONSTITUTIONALISATION. I tried the plural, but that didn't work. That kind of puzzled me until I realized (or realised?) that I'd already used the S I needed for that. Anyway, that gave me 128 points for three words. I'm short of your 133 points for three words, but I figure that may be unbeatable.

[lalatan]

Originally Posted by Spike1007

I've also run across words that don't work (no matter how many times I type them) until I add some prefix or something. You have my sympathies.

I'm pretty sure I've had BAREHEADEDNESSESS before, but didn't even try without the -ES, since it wouldn't have been enough points.

I did get CONSTITUTIONALIZATION(S) yesterday. I also got CONSTITUTIONALISATION. I tried the plural, but that didn't work. That kind of puzzled me until I realized (or realised?) that I'd already used the S I needed for that. Anyway, that gave me 128 points for three words. I'm short of your 133 points for three words, but I figure that may be unbeatable.

Thanks Spike but I wasn't upset at all, just thought it was bizarre the singular is disallowed. I wouldn't normally play a word lower in pt value when I feel I've found the best word on the board already. In this case I thought I'd add to my total pts since very little would affect my avg pts/word at this pt in the month.

Haha, I chuckled when I read your story about the CONSTITUTIONALIZATION(S) board. I played that board before with exactly the same results. I also tried CONSTITUTIONALISATIONS, wondered why it didn't work and then realized I'd used the S.

In these days of political correctness, perhaps REALISZATIONS and CONSTITUTIONALISZATION(S) etc. should be coined so British and North Americans would both feel included.

[lalatan]

It was remarkable to me that I scored 20 pts when I played ROLLERCOASTERS. Seems like a fairly commonly used word to me. No oddball characters in it. In Scrabble they'd all score 1 pt except for the c (still only 3 pts).

[justno]

DAIS is wide whilst DAISES is common. DAIS seems like a more commonly used word to me.

[JJBeanie]

justno, I would have thought the same thing. Definitely odd.

My scoring weirdness: I found the 15 letter word "professionalise" which scored 18 points. The current longest word and best word is "professionalist" which is also 15 letters but scored 29 points!

[lalatan]

JJBeanie, I likely set the records with PROFESSIONALIST on that game you played. I played it about a week ago and was mildly surprised it was valid and worth 29.

I thought this was pretty weird. I played LITHOLOGISTS for 22/12 then spotted THEOLOGISTS. Seemed like a more common word and was shorter but I played it anyway, just in case. It was 13/11. After the game submitted, I saw the previous best word was THEOLOGIST (18/10) and the longest word was THEOLOGISTS. (THEOLOGIES was 9/10.) So the singular was worth quite a bit more than the plural.

Today I swiped INTERPENETRATIONS in a game to see if it'd word. It was invalid so I tried INTERPENETRATION in case only the singular was valid. 19 pts. I reswiped INTERPENETRATIONS and it was worth 32! Seems to me the usage of either of those words wouldn't be that much different.

But this is WordTwist Boggle so the weirdness will continue...

[Nylimb]

MISTAL (a cowshed) is worth 10 points, but MISTALS is only worth 7.

I'd never heard of either word before, but I'd run out of words that I knew and I figured they were worth a try.

[InsertNameHere]

I have figured out why this happens. I call it the "dictionary overlap effect". As erakis17 once mentioned, words from 3-15 letters are validated for existence through the Scrabble SOWPODS dictionary, a combination, and for speech reason anagram, of the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary and the Official Scrabble Words dictionary. However, a scrabble board is only 15 squares by 15 squares, resulting in no 16+ letter words in that dictionary. You can make words up to 25 letters in WordTwist 5X5, therefore resulting in the need for another dictionary. The 16-25 letter word dictionary is Yet Another Word List, or YAWL, a (usually) much more comprehensive dictionary.

BAREHEADEDNESS is 14 letters, therefore falling into the smaller SOWPODS dictionary where it goes unrecognized as a word. BAREHEADEDNESSES, however, is 16 letters therefore falling into the larger YAWL dictionary, in which it is a word. In DrPlacebo's case, we see the other side of this. PHOTOMACROGRAPH is 15 letters (SOWPODS), and the surprisingly illegitimate PHOTOMACROGRAPHS is 16 letters (YAWL) Oh, wouldn't it be nice if we just used one dictionary for everything.

A good multi-dictionary lookup site is Quinapalus Word Matcher, the first underlined link of the second result when you look up "yawl word list lookup".