Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

I can't hope to beat an experienced native speaker at this game, but it might be useful for expanding my vocabulary.

Case in point: my language doesn't really have a word for "almonry" - there's usually no dedicated space for collecting/dispensing alms.

By far the best Scrabble player I ever encountered was a former corporate drone in his 50s, who hiked 40km+ daily in the Carpathians and was in charge of maintaining a mountain shelter there.

When he wasn't out hiking, chopping wood or collecting water he would be sitting in the common room absolutely dominating the Scrabble board. I don't know his story and he didn't talk much about himself, but with age I increasingly get the appeal of such a life.

Without context, I doubt many native English speakers would know the meaning of "almonry".

From [1], they seem obsolete well before any colonization, so it's probably only British people with an interest in church history.

"Alms" is already fairly obscure, [2] puts it at word frequency 44625. Almonry is not in the top 333,333 words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almonry

[2] http://norvig.com/ngrams/

Be wary of the top answers it will give you. Quite a lot of the top answers will technically be words in English but are essentially completely unused and most people won't even know or understand them.

For instance, today's top words:

Obvert - I know this one but it isn't too common.

Overt - This was my answer, it's not uncommon.

Over - Common

Evo - I've never seen this used as a word other than a name.

Bevor - Apparently this is medieval neck armour. Uncommon.

Ouvert - From ballet according to the internet. Uncommon, although I know it as a French word.

Note this isn't the game's fault, they're all in the scrabble dictionary it's using. These words are only useful if you want to win scrabble, not if you want to speak English.

I found obvert in the daily puzzles.. and tabanid in the practice puzzle. There's nothing wrong with learning "Scrabble" words.

You can also play against an easier ai here - https://dadagrams.com/play

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