Dictionaries
A dictionary in scrabbleTracker is two things:
- A word list used to validate plays and guess placement.
- A mode — advisory or enforced — that decides whether the app stops you from playing words that aren’t on it.
Built-in dictionaries
- ENABLE — A public-domain word list with about 172,000 entries. Good general coverage; not the same as the official Scrabble lists (TWL / SOWPODS) but free of licensing strings.
- OSPD7 — The seventh edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, around 110,000 entries up to eight letters. Tighter list than ENABLE, closer to how casual North American Scrabble is actually adjudicated. Pair it with tournament rules and you can challenge with confidence.
Both ship with the app. Pick one per game on the New Session screen. Pairing a dictionary with a ruleset is part of the table-rules conversation: ENABLE + Casual Standard for relaxed play, OSPD7 + North American Tournament when the family wants to play it strict.
Strict mode
scrabbleTracker can either police your typing or stay out of the way. The default is to stay out of the way — the table is the source of truth and the app shouldn’t second-guess a ruling the players agreed to. You can switch on strict mode if you want the app to block plays that aren’t real words.
| Strict mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| on | Words must be in the dictionary to be submitted. The submit button is disabled for off-list plays. A small STRICT badge appears next to the dictionary name in the game header so everyone at the table sees it. |
| off (default) | Any word can be played. The dictionary just helps the app guess where the tiles landed. Disputes settle by challenge at the table. |
Casual Standard and House Rules let you choose either way — turn the Block words that aren’t in the dictionary toggle on or off when you set up the game. Tournament rulesets (International, North American) lock strict mode on, because that’s the whole point of tournament rules.
The choice is fixed at game-start and snapshotted onto the game.
Tap-to-define
Whichever dictionary is active for the game, every played word in the turn log is tappable. Tap one to open a definition sheet with the meaning, part of speech, and any cross-words the play formed:
Definitions come from a separate pool keyed by the word itself, so a word you played in an ENABLE game can still have a definition if one exists in our reference. A blank sheet just means we don’t have a definition for that word yet — the play still stands.
See Word definitions for the lookup behaviour and source attribution.