Scrabble on facebook. What do you think?

Doesn’t seem to enforce any kind of dictionary on the words you can use, and I don’t see any method to challenge a word.

Huh? I’m more familiar with the other Facebook crossword-game, but I thought they worked more or less the same where it just won’t let you play a word if it isn’t in the dictionary it uses. Is that not the case?

I would actually love it if there were a version that would let you play anything and then challenge it after the fact-- I can usually beat my SO at real-life scrabble because her spelling is atrocious, but online she always clobbers me. Plus then you could agree to just allow the dirty words that aren’t in the dictionary.

It allowed my opponent to play the word “fayed”.

It does have a built-in dictionary, and fayed is a word. It won’t let you play a word not in the dictionary.

You lose the challenge. To be fair, skip your next turn.

The Scrabble dictionary is actually far more strict than the Words with Friends dictionary. There are several words that WWF accepts that Facebook Scrabble won’t let me play.

A friend just played JANE. Does anyone know why that’s legal?

Because it’s a word in the dictionary.

Likely due to this definition:

jane - uncapitalized is described in the Scrabble dictionary as “a girl or a woman.”
Words with friends does not allow the word “fop” though. I thought that was strange.

Thanks, MsWhatsIt and denquiote! Appreciate the helpful answers. I didn’t find it in the online dictionary I consulted.

Don’t know if I am going to keep playing, though. I am old school, and to me, just randomly combining letters to see if the game will accept them is lame. A friend just played “wud” and stentor." I know her well enough to know there is no way she knows those words.

You don’t play much Scrabble, do you?

Your friend may also be using Scrabble Cheat or some other similar site. Some of my friends use some interesting words and try to fake that they knew the definition all along. :rolleyes:

The nature of the Internet is such that the play has to be slightly different. Just treat it like you would any “house rules” board game variant. I think there must be some version out there though that has standard challenge rules, perhaps the iPhone/android app has that option? At least I’d think enough people are concerned about it that there’d be a clone out there for fundies.

I don’t mind when people are clearly just trying out different combinations to see what works, but when someone is pretty obviously using an anagram/cheat program so that practically every word they play is some obscure thing that nobody with a normal vocabulary would know, I stop re-matching them. That takes the fun out of the game for me.

You don’t have to know the definition in regular Scrabble either. You just have to know that it’s a word. I used to play a lot of Scrabble and had all of the two letter words and Q-words without a U memorized. I didn’t know or care what some of them meant.

On the other hand, I have played iPhone Words with Friends with random people and some of them are pretty clearly using some kind of program to come up with some pretty obscure stuff. Maybe they really are that good though.

No, you don’t have to know the definition but the use of an obscure scientific word from someone who doesn’t know how to spell science is just wrong. I also stop re-matching them.