Official Tournament and Club Word List or Tournament Word List, referred to as OTaCWL, OWL, or TWL, is the official word authority for tournament Scrabble in the USA, Canada[1] and Thailand. It is based on the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) with modifications to make it more suitable for tournament play. Its British counterpart is Chambers Official Scrabble Words, and the combination of the two word lists is known as SOWPODS.
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North American tournament Scrabble currently uses the second edition of OWL (variously referred to as OWL2, OTCWL2, TWL2, and TWL06). This version was created by the National Scrabble Association Dictionary Committee in late 2005 and took effect on March 1, 2006. OWL2 corresponds to the fourth edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, but includes words that are not considered suitable for inclusion in that work.[2]
The print version contains several errors which have been corrected on the National Scrabble Association's web site.
The decision to bowdlerize the OSPD in its third edition by removing a large number of possibly offensive words necessitated a separate, unabridged word list for tournament use. The first edition of OWL was created by the National Scrabble Association Dictionary Committee, chaired by John Chew, and took effect on March 2nd, 1998. To avoid controversy, it was only available for sale to NSA members, and unlike the OSPD, did not include definitions for its words. To provide additional value for tournament players, the OWL includes words whose base or inflected forms have up to nine letters, rather than the OSPD's eight. OSPD3 was created from OSPD2 by adding all appropriate words that had been added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (MWCD) in the interim; OWL was then formed by restoring possibly offensive words removed from OSPD3, and adding nine-letter words from MWCD.[2]
The list for 2006 (a.k.a. TWL06, plus the Long Word List) contains 178,691 words,[3] comprising:
| Number of letters | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of words | 101 | 1,015 | 4,030 | 8,938 | 15,788 | 24,029 | 29,766 | 29,150 | 22,326 | 16,165 | 11,417 | 7,750 | 5,059 | 3,157 |
Unlike the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, OWL is a list and does not include definitions. OWL also contains words not included in OSPD because they are considered offensive,[4] and a number of other additional words (mostly registered trademarks). Print versions of OWL can be purchased only through the NSA.
OWL is supplemented by the NSA Dictionary Committee's Official Long Words List, which includes all acceptable 10 to 15 letter words not already included in the OWL. The word list was compiled using Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition.