What abbreviations? Scrabble doesn’t allow abbreviations unless they’ve become words themselves, like, say, “pol” for politician, which you may find in normal running prose or spoken. There’s also words that may look like abbreviations, like aa or ae or ai, but those are words. (The first is a type of lava – I’ve actually seen this one in print in National Geographic or similar, the second is another word for “one,” (See Robert Burns’s “Ae Fond Kiss”), and the third is a type of three-toed sloth. OK, that one I haven’t come across organically, but I don’t read about sloths.)
I don’t remember, and again don’t have a copy of the Scrabble dictionary in question – oh, I do remember one of them: AG which they said meant “agriculture”. People certainly do say, for instance, “New York Ag and Markets” but I still say that’s an abbreviation; I’ve never heard it in common use except in that sort of fashion, shortening a long name.
Not in modern English. If they’re going to allow that, then they should be allowing the whole OED.
– I am however clearly not in charge of the Scrabble™ dictionary. It’s their game, they can write their dictionary however they want; though it’s confusing to say “no abbreviations” in the rules and then allow some in the dictionary.
Midnight’s Children is one of the great novels.
I admit I’ve never gotten through Pynchon’s doorstop works, despite several tries.
That’s in all the “normal” online dictionaries like dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster. It’s perfectly valid as it is being used as a word. I can understand quibbling about archaic words, though. Scrabble does allow a lot of old words and spellings. But I’ve come across “ae” in my own reading of Burns poetry. Whey should I not be allowed to use the word? I know it, and if you don’t, tough.
On the other hand, as long as a dictionary is agreed to – it can be any one – I can choose to play it or not based on whether I think that dictionary has it. It’s a flexible game that can be played to whatever ruleset the people playing agree to. For example, Scrabble not all that long ago banned a bunch of obscene words, so you have to know what word list is allowed in what tournament you’re playing. A lot of Scrabble players did not like this, so you have larger wordlists used in those tournaments that allow the "banned’ words. Not that I play competetive scrabble – it just interests me, and when I play, I do prefer to play with those who play all the obscure words on the 2- and 3-letter-word lists, “q” words without ‘u’ and all that.
One might argue that allowing a large number of two-letter words makes the game more interesting, by facilitating playing words in parallel.
Yeah, that’s where I like it. It turns it from a purely word game to something even more strategic and pattern finding, but I know that’s not for everyone.
I vaguely remembered it as being a genetics term; I took graduate level biochemistry, but that was some time ago. I think I probably would have guessed it if I saw CO_ON and I knew it wasn’t L, but again I’m surprised to see it as a Wordle solution. Looks like the US version is a lot more dumbed down.