Capital letters  

Hi Alex,

the definition of playable words for Swedish competitive Scrabble does indeed differ from the one that you can find on the rule sheet in the Swedish Scrabble board game. 

In short, the definition of playable words during Swedish competitive play is as follows (complete definition can be found at http://scrabbleforbundet.se/regler/ , in section “Godkända ord”):

• The word list used is SAOL, the 14th edition.
• Playable words are those that are written in bold text, except for words containing non-alphabetic characters like “/”, “-” or numbers
• Words with accent marks are playable, with the accent marks removed. E.g. “crêpe” can be played as “crepe” and “pietà’ as “pieta”.
• Words containing any of the letters q, w, ü or æ are playable, but only with the use of a blank.

However, it hasn’t always been like this. The clause that defines all words in bold text as playable has been in the rules since the first version of the rules from 1999. There was also a clause saying that words with capital letters should not be playable. 

With the release of the 13th edition of SAOL, there were a couple of bigger changes as to which words were included in the word list. Irregular verb forms were, for example, now separate entries. A number of acronyms had also found their way into the word list. These changes brought up for discussion which words should actually be playable. After a long and lively debate, a decision was taken to change the definition. Words containing capital letters should from now on be seen as playable words. This is the definition that has been in use since then.

/Roland