Appeal to the rules committee

An appeal which had its origins in this afternoon's game of Scrabble. Towards the end of the game BH put down 'zo' which she claimed was a proper word, attested either by FIL (who kept a private list of obscure two letter words) or by a rules conscious member of my family. Her bluff, if that is what it was, succeeded and I did not challenge. But I did, I might say, go on to win by a comfortable margin, zo notwithstanding. I might even have survived had it been on the triple word, which it was not.

After the game, I looked it up in OED (first edition, 1900 or so, four feet of it) with the result snapped left. Yes, it is a head word, but it is in the smaller of the two fonts used for head words and it is marked as dialect.

Some people we know, owning dictionaries with only one size of head word, play to the rule that only head words counts. Which excludes plurals, derived forms of verbs and such like - but, if that is the rule one plays to, so be it. A rule which has the great advantage of simplicity.

Most people exclude proper nouns - indeed it may say something about that on the box - while some people exclude a selection from obsolete, dialect, slang and foreign.

Using our dictionary, the simple rule about head words would have to be refined. First, to deal with the two sizes. Then to rule on words marked with a '†' (dagger), which in OED means obsolete. To rule on words like 'zoa' printed in head word font, but not as a head word. To rule on things like 'zizz' described as syllables, rather than as words. To exclude fragments marked with a '-' (hyphen) fore or aft, suffixes and prefixes respectively. More tricky, OED also includes head words which are or are close to being proper nouns, for example India, Indian, Indian corn and Indian fig, with these last two spelt as two words without a hyphen. So perhaps another exclusion covering multi-part or hyphenated head words. And while 'India' is a place, reasonably clearly a proper noun, 'Indian' is not so clear at all. Certainly content dependant, and it would be quite a tricky bit of text processing (using the OED entry as input) which sorted all this out for one.

So a challenge for readers is to come up with a bit of Visual Basic which I can feed into my laptop to support my role as chairman of the rules committee, seconded from the trolley rules committee for the duration. The usual modest prize is offered for the best bit.

PS: along the way, I also checked 'pi'. Which is clearly in on account of Greek circles. But it also had a second, full head word for a bit of University (mostly Oxbridge at the time of writing) or public school slang for someone who is a bit pious, a bit pompously so. A word I think I have come across in inter-war novels, but that might be the brain trying to show off, as it often does when it has just been told the answer and the minefield, as it were, has been cleared.