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The ABLE (Alternate British LExicon) list purports to represent the
contents of the fourth edition of OSW, plus longer words from the 1997
Chambers Dictionary. The notorious OSW is itself based on the Chambers
Dictionary, which is the official reference for Scrabble players in
Britain. We have removed words duplicated in the ENABLE list to reduce
the size of the archive.
Due to copyright considerations, the maintainers of ENABLE could
not reproduce the "official" OSW. Under highly obscure circumstances,
however, we came into possession of an equivalent list. It seems that a
mysterious individual, identifying himself only as "The Third Man" (with
more than a slight resemblance to the young Orson Wells), handed over a
sealed diplomatic pouch on a dark and stormy night to a cashiered ex-MI6
operative. There were strains of zither music in the background, and the
whole sordid affair had a tinge of disreputable sleaziness. Somehow, a
bundle of papers from the pouch found its way into a dumpster behind the
Pentagon, from whence it was retrieved by an inebriated denizen of the
nearby Men's Shelter. There the tangled trail of this latter day version
of the Pentagon Papers vanished until... Years later, one of the ENABLE
maintainers purchased a battered, but otherwise undistinguished statuette
of a black falcon from the venerable auction firm of Spade & Archer. The
base of the statuette, next to the "Made in Malta" inscription, seemed
to contain a hollow space. Within it was a sheaf of yellowing mildewy
papers. It was a handwritten word list, the last surviving facsimile of
the ABLE list! ...And the rest, as they say, is history.
For this revision of the ENABLE2K Supplement, the ABLE list has been
improved in the following ways. It has incorporated changes from the
fourth edition of OSW. A significant number of errors have been
corrected. And finally, two more controversial changes have been
made. First, OSW contains a small number of words which are not valid
Scrabble plays according to American rules. These include foreign
words (bitte), words with no part of speech (winna) and words
containing capital letters (pH). These words have been removed from
the ABLE list. Additionally, in the process of revising ABLE, we
discovered a number of cases where we believe the compilers of OSW
have misinterpreted Chambers. There are both words whose inclusion
is not justified (chilioi, which appears only in an etymology) and
words which should have been included but were not (coinop). We
have corrected both sorts of errors, and regard these changes as
"signature words" for ABLE. (Perhaps a better term would be "signature
corrections", as some words were removed rather than added.)
Further information on Alan Beale's researches on ABLE, including the
complete ABLE list without removal of words duplicated in ENABLE, is
available as an additional supplement to ENABLE2K. This supplement
also contains full lists of the invalid Scrabble words and the
"signature corrections".
By combining the "ABLE.LST" file from this archive with "WORD.LST"
from ENABLE2K, interested parties can create a workable version of the
"SOWPODS" list beloved of tournament word gamers. This may be accomplished
either using Alan Beale's "makelist" utility or by a simple UNIX pipe
(cat WORD.LST ABLE.LST | sort | uniq > SOWPODS.LST).
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