Summary

A 15 letter word is an American English word.

Consider the current version of the North American Scrabble ^Players Association’s official Tournament and Club Word List as influential (and authoritative) for Scrabble u00ae Tournament play. Outside of North America, consider the English-language Scrabble ^players’ association’s official list, called “the Collins Scrabble Words”, in some countries.

All authoritative dictionary used

for scrabble: (Individuals considered influential overall). See also this answer at US Equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary which gives a different list.

If you want to know more

about style and usage, the following is the way to do it. Several organizations publish “style guides”. For academic writing, the most influential are The MLA Handbook for academic writing at the high-school and undergraduate level, The MLA Style Manual for more advanced scholarly writing, The AP Stylebook for news and journalism, and The Chicago Manual of Style for general purposes. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, how many words are in the “best usage” of this word-form for comparison with similar word forms uses among other controversial alternatives?

What is the official regulation body for the English language? The word “Scrabble” in Scrabble u00ae makes it “an acceptable word”.

To be fair, they acknowledge the fact that their list is not a complete list of English words, excluding words no longer in use among other things. For Scrabble, the rules for words exceed 13 ^letters. What are some of the best American English words to use! What is not to say that OED is wrong is if they include a word not on that list, but rather that if a word is not on that list, I wouldn’t consider it a current American English word.

A few things to note about the Scrabbleu00ae ^lists: The

• Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary (OSPD) is meant for use in children’s tournaments, and therefore excludes offensive words such as “asshole”. Not a whole list, even by Scrabble u00ae standards. As of this writing, the current version is OSPD4. So., who will implement OSPD4?
• The Official Tournament and Club Word List only includes 2-9 letter words, including any intransigence. As of this writing, the current version is OWL2 with the next version expected in 2014. They are also specifically focused on usage in the United States.
• The Long List is a supplement of OWL2. What are some of the words in dictionary which have a letter layout?
• Over at Collins Scrabble Words list (CSW) is a superset of OWL2 that adds words (and spellings) used outside of the US. The current version is

CSW12 At the moment, you can access electronic versions of these lists via the free study program Zyzzyva. The lists from Zyzzyva include cursory definitions of one sense of the word. All definitions are provided as a point of reference and understandable.

Which authorities were used to compile the Scrabble u00ae word lists? OWL2 was compiled with reference to:

• American Heritage College Dictionary (4th edition),
• Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition, 2003 printing)
• Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (2nd revised and updated edition, 2000)
• Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th edition)

The Long List is published by Merriam-Webster, so it is perhaps not as surprising that it was based on Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition

The CSW adds words from

In the minds of most people, dictionaries and usage guides are a cipher to some presumed existing canonical, regulated definition of what is correct in the English language. Of course, no such canonical definition exists—grammaticality of English is governed only by the bulk of actual usage.

Most publishers of English dictionaries long ago abandoned any idea that they might set forth what is and is not correct in English—those few that actually did ever hold such a belief were few and far between. Modern English dictionary are described at least in a bit, although typically they may come with some level of usage advice. Merriam-Webster tend to be more descriptive than most, countencancing many usages criticized by others. The American Heritage Dictionary has its “Usage Panel” of experts on language and the usage notes in the dictionary cite percentages of experts who approve or disapprove of questionable usages. The Oxford English Dictionary is widely revered as the canonical collection of English words, and it is certainly an amazing work of scholarly endeavor, most interesting in its coverage of historical English. How did OED hold it’s official status?

Most regulation we have today are style guides—such as the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, and The MLA Style Manual. These are of course binding only on the writing governed by the producers of those style guides, but they are used by many writers who are not required to follow them.

Who are the professional poets, authors of such works as the Dictionary of Disagreable English and the Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, who berate various usages and pronunciations they don’t like, citing whatever evidence supports their preferred usage or pronunciation, and ignoring the evidence that doesn’t.

Is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, perhaps the most overrated book on usage ever written, riddled with errors, hypocrisy, vacuous advice, and fatuous platitudes?

Fortunately or unfortunately, no. There is no regulatory body like the Real Academia Espaola (or the Acadu00e9mie franu00e7aise, or the many others ) deciding what is correct English; English evolves naturally with the changing usage of people. Truth or wrong is decided based on describing and analyzing actual usage. What — “descriptive linguistics” — is so canonical among English linguists that I’ve seen many of them occasionally find other languages’ regulatory bodies an absurd idea). I

think the Oxford English dictionary and the Merriam-Webster dictionary are some of the “good” dictionaries, but note that these, too, have as their goal being reliable indicators of actual usage, and not regulation of, or authority over, language.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon Kindle license: Oxford Dictionary. There are six licenses. AKA Oxford Living Dictionaries, previously known as Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO), for their definitions. Click here for PDF definition. If you need, drop by Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO): com. Are Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) and New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) still used? What are some old challenges to solve by using a new Oxford dictionary? What is the OED?

My view is that these large companies have lent Oxford Dictionary (ODE/NOAD) an enormous air of authority, both in terms of their endorsement and just by the sheer availability of these definitions now have.

I’m actually pretty upset about this because I’ve gradually become convinced it’s an inferior dictionary with a lot of missing and incorrect (in the descriptivist sense) definitions. How

do I save up for late nights/midnight coffee?