The two-letter word is one of 300 new additions to the latest version of the official Scrabble Players` Dictionary released by Merriam-Webster on Monday. Judy Cole, a competitive player who also organizes Scrabble tournaments, said OK is “definitely more common than many other words in the word list.” Probably from Ottoman Turkish ظرف (zarf), from Arabic ظَرْف (ẓarf). Yes. The word zarf is an American Scrabble word. The word zarf is worth 16 points in Scrabble: Since the OSPD was first published in 1978, the creation of a series of official Scrabble words has been the result of a collaboration between the players and Merriam-Webster. The eight editions of Scrabble`s books (the OWL was first published in 1996) took words from 14 sources: five prints from Merriam-Webster`s Collegiate plus nine editions of dictionaries from five other publishers – Funk & Wagnalls, American Heritage, Webster`s New World, Random House and Oxford. Volunteers in the Scrabble community scour dictionaries to identify words that fit the rules of the game and are new to the game. Merriam-Webster lexicographers check words, write short definitions for OSPD, and publish books. But of all these words, it was the inclusion of “OK” that shared some Scrabble players. Scrabble rules prohibit acronyms that are always written with capital letters, such as IQ or TV. This seems to rule out OK, although the word “ok” has long been included as a verb in the dictionary.

WordNet ® Princeton University. wordnet.princeton.edu However, not all Scrabble players agree with OK, especially at the highest level of the game. Jackson Smylie, who ranks among the top 10 Scrabble tournament players in North America, said its inclusion “could open the door to many other acronyms that are not very literal.” After all, Hasbro never received permission from other dictionary publishers to use their words to compile OSPD and OWL, and it never mentioned them by name. But even if Hasbro were to argue that it legally borrowed only a small number of words from non-Merriam-Webster dictionaries, Williamson said the company could face a “copyright abuse” problem: that is, suing for infringement of its own word lists if it uses unlicensed word lists from other publishers. Dictionaries enjoy copyright protection for two main reasons: their creators decide which words to include, and the entries contain definitions and other original documents. (Just last week, a federal court in Massachusetts ruled against a plaintiff who wanted to copy and reuse most of Merriam-Webster`s Collegiate, including definitions, for its own dictionary.) But in 1991, in Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., the Supreme Court ruled that a telephone company has no copyright in its blank pages. That`s because the list of names and numbers lacked an important requirement: originality. Other words you can form with the same letters: arf far fra solutions and cheats for all popular word games: Words with Friends, Wordle, Wordscapes, and 100 others. So the fundamental question is: Is a list of Scrabble words uncreative or is its compilation as red as a phone book? The fourth criterion for fair dealing – the “quantity and relative importance of the proportion used” – could be more tricky.

In Hasbro`s favor, it`s clear that Scrabble app makers should borrow the entire new OWL for their products to be useful. But developers could argue that scrabblers only access small parts of lists at a time, and they could disable features that allow users to download words. (Zyzzyva now encrypts word lists.) This could make the facts of a Scrabble lawsuit similar to those of two recent cases, Google Books and TVEyes, in which courts ruled in favor of defendants who created huge databases of material — books in the first case, TV and radio shows in the second — but provided only small parts to users at once. “We have an organized word list that is created for the purposes of the game and relates directly to the game. It`s copyrighted,” says Berkowitz, the Hasbro executive. “From Hasbro`s perspective, the two are combined and we see them as one and the same.” Yes, zarf is a valid Scrabble word. ZARF: (Arabic) an ornamental metal stand for a coffee cup without a handle, also ZURF [n-S] “Although [OK] comes from a multifaceted abbreviation of `oll korrect,` it functions as a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and has entered dictionaries as such,” wrote Emily Brewster, co-editor of Merriam Webster, in an email to Business Insider. “The word has been around for a long time, but the two-letter spelling didn`t suit Scrabble games because it was always capitalized.” The question then arises as to whether the use of word lists by programs such as Zyzzyva is fair use.

Three of the four fair dealing criteria seem to work against Hasbro. Use of copyrighted material is for “non-profit or educational purposes” (to help Scrabble players learn words, not to make money selling a product); the material is very factual (word lists); and its use has little impact on the market or value of the copyrighted work (people still buy the dead tree owl, Hasbro didn`t care about the previous use of digital listings, and the company didn`t enter the small market for advanced Scrabble study tools). There`s a simple solution that won`t stifle the creation of the next Scrabble tool and won`t give players access to the words on any platform they want. Hasbro could allow developers to use the listings upon request, free of charge, but on condition that they post a copyright notice. That`s what HarperCollins, which publishes the word list that governs the English game outside of North America (and is gaining ground here in tournaments), has done with programs like Zyzzyva. If someone has tried to monetize an app that uses listings without permission, well, that`s why companies have lawyers. Even if a judge agreed with this reasoning, there are other reasons why Hasbro might be in an awkward legal position when looking for a Scrabble tool to use word lists. On the one hand, a court cannot give sympathetic consideration to the fact that the lists were drawn up with the help of volunteers; Scrabble players are not paid for their work. In addition, Hasbro has almost never monitored the use of clandestine lists. (He shut down the imitation game Scrabulous in 2008, not because of the words, but because the game hurt Hasbro`s board design and other brands.) The company wasn`t even particularly attentive internally. Electronic Arts` official Hasbro-licensed Scrabble app lists Merriam-Webster, not Hasbro, as the OSPD`s copyright holder and doesn`t even mention the OWL the app appears to use (swear words are playable). The EA app also doesn`t recognize sources for Italian, German, and Portuguese word list options.

Competing scrabblers view Hasbro`s approach as limiting, not democratizing. No one disputes that the Company has the right to protect and control what it considers to be its intellectual property, including against commercial challenges. But for decades, it was gamers, not Hasbro, who created the physical and intellectual things — word lists, tournaments, grading systems, learning aids, equipment — that transformed the company`s sheltered game, invented by an unemployed architect in the 1930s, into a sophisticated, media-friendly subculture. (I wrote a book about it.) “We did it as a labor of love,” César Del Solar, who developed the Anagram site Aerolith, told me.