DecisionalReview.info

More than the printed version

(The 5 star rating is based on the assumption that you’re a Scrabble player; this product wouldn’t be very useful to non-players.)

This is an electronic version of the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary 4th Edition (OSPD4), with some features that make it much more valuable than the print edition. It’s more compact, and it is a lot faster to look up a disputed word than flipping through the book. It also has a few games to help sharpen your word skills and a “build” function that lets you enter your rack and get a list of all the words that can be formed from those letters, highest-scoring to lowest-scoring.

But what really makes this more valuable than the print version is a neat undocumented feature. As you may know, the OSPD4 says on the cover “Endorsed by the National Scrabble Association for recreational and school use.” That’s right, the “Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary” is not really official. For club and tournament play they use the “Official Tournament and Club Word List” (OTCWL or OWL2). This is because as of OSPD3 a lot of “offensive” words (cuss words, ethnic slurs) were removed from the dictionary. These words are still permitted in tournament play. You won’t find this in the instructions, but you can turn the SRC-228 into an OWL2 dictionary by doing the following: at the “Ready” prompt, type in **otcwl and press “Enter.” The “Ready” prompt will be replaced with “Search OTCW List” and you will now be able to check a lot of new words. It will only give a definition for the OSPD4 words, but it will say “Correct Word” for the OWL2 words. These words will also show up on your “Build” list. Besides the naughty words, OWL2 also adds a lot of words that are trademarks such as “Kleenex” and “Aqualung.” This feature will stay in effect until you change the batteries or disable it. **otcwl acts as a toggle, so if don’t want the kids to have access to these words, just enter it again and it reverts to OSPD4.

Note that like the printed version, the electronic version only contains words up to 8 letters in length (with the exception of inflected forms of those words). So a correct word like “submariner” would not be found in it. You’ll need an extra dictionary if someone plays a bigger word. (This doesn’t happen that often.)

Update (5/19/2012): I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, Scrabble SCR-228 Players Dictionary Electronics, was written by Steve Keeley.

The average rating for this item is 4.7 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.