The WWP is delighted to report that we have developed a new interface that will enhance the texts in Women Writers Online by allowing users to discover the Scrabble® scores for the words in each text. The Women Writers Online: Scrabble Discovery Interface (WWO:SDI) provides sortable lists for all WWO texts, making it possible for users to determine the highest- and lowest-scoring words in the collection. The chart also denotes words that cannot be played in a single turn because they are longer than seven letters and words that could not be played using the letters provided by a standard Scrabble® set.

For example, the highest-scoring words in Harriet Cheney’s 1824 novel, A Peep at the Pilgrims, are “characterized” and “philosophically,” both with 30 points—although neither could be played on a single turn. The highest-scoring word in Ann Yearsley’s 1787 Poems on Various Subjects is “whizzing” at 33 points, but this word would only be possible if a player smuggled in an extra “z” tile from another set. The highest scoring word in the entire collection is “quizzically” at 43 points from Sarah Green’s 1810 Romance Readers and Romance Writers. The text with the highest average Scrabble® score is The Latter Examination of Anne Askew, 1547, which has words like “quyckeneth” and “excommunycate” at 31 points and “pertycypacyon” at 30 points. Archaic spelling seems to bring an advantage in this case! For sheer number of words that could be used in a Scrabble® game, the winner is Judith Murray’s 1798 The Gleaner, with 15,490 total playable words.

This interface uses cutting-edge technology to exclude words that are not allowed in standard Scrabble® games, drawing on the detailed encoding in the Women Writers Online collection. For example, excluding the contents of <name>, <persName>, <orgName>, <placeName>, and <speaker> removes many proper nouns from the results. Similarly, the interface excludes dialect and non-English words. We have also regularized some archaic letterforms, such as the long s (ſ), and regularized some spelling, such as i/j and u/v substitutions. The interface displays expanded versions of abbreviations and corrections of errors, wherever these are available.

We are confident that our readers will find WWO:SDI a valuable research tool, as well as a useful pedagogical resource. At long last, it is possible to compare texts by the important metric of their maximum and average scores in a Scrabble® game. We hope that this tool will revolutionize the study of early women writers and perhaps lead to new fields of word-game based literary scholarship.

We hope to add additional functionality to this useful resource very soon–including the option to have two authors or texts play off against each other in a simulated game. We expect to add scoring information on WWO texts’ performance in other word games, including Boggle®, Upwords®, and Bananagrams®. Finally, we are investigating the possibility of developing a WWO Edition Scrabble set, which would include extra “u” and “i” tiles (to be scored at 2 or 8 points when used in substitution for “v” and “j”). The set would also contain tiles for: ſ, æ, œ, ☉, and ☾ (these last two are essential in any serious gameplay for scholars of the seventeenth-century prophet Eleanor Davies).

We expect to have these new materials ready for release no later than one year from today, April 1, 2017.

For more on the practical side of the WWO:SDI tool, including how we built the tool and have been using it in proofing, please see this post.