A correction

[womzilla]

At this week's NYRSF Weekly Meeting (come one! come all), I said that "leitmotiv" was the only English word ending in "v". I was wrong; in SOWPODS*, there are 19:

dev, ganev, guv, improv, isogriv, lav, leitmotiv, lev, luv, maglev, moshav, rev, schav, shiv, spiv, stotinov, tav, tolarjev, vav

Please adjust your memory accordingly.

*As mentioned previously, SOWPODS is the combined Official Scrabble Words and Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary; there are several online versions.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I think at this point "improv" is a "real" word--while the word is an obvious abbreviation, when used to to refer to "improvisational comedy" it's at least as specific a word as "maglev".

On many of the others: SOWPODS incorporates the British "Official Scrabble Words" list (OSW), which is based on the Chambers Dictionary. According to Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak, many Scrabble players criticize the Chambers dictionary for including truly dubious words, things like "ch", which is, according to Chambers, a Midlands dialectic version of "I" used in some abbreviations. ("Ch'd" for "I'd").

"Luv" is clearly similar--I found it on WordWebOnline (http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/LUV) as a written form of the endearment ("Hello, luv."). Whether this qualifies as a "real" word depends clearly on the selection criteria you use to root out deliberate misspelling and other slang.

"Vav", on the other hand, is one spelling of the name of the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, as in Yah Heh Vav Heh. SOWPODS includes a lot of words like that, which reminds me of one of my favorite word game anecdotes.

Years ago, I was playing the card game Palabra with my friend Tracy. Palabra is basically a board-less version of Scrabble with a few twists. Tract was a low-level tournament Scrabble player--he'd go to tournaments and on average win enough prize money to pay for his tournaments--so of course he was kicking me six ways to Sunday. At one point he laid down the letters X-I-S, declared the score, and drew new cards. I said, "I'm not going to challenge that, I'm sure it's a real word, but WHAT IS THAT?"

"'Xis'--it's the plural of 'xi', the Greek letter, also spelled 'chi'".

"Oh, okay", I responded. "You do realize you could have just as easily played 'SIX'"?

He started, and stared at the cards. "That never occurred to me."