Scrabble Gate

It took me all of fifteen minutes to figure out what I would write about today.  My first thought was pearly gate and I considered making up a story about the heavenly gates.  My next thought was Watergate, the whole Richard Nixon thing and I was not sure how I would approach that, but it is an interesting part of American history.  I went on to think about a professional gate crasher, sort of along the lines of Wedding Crashers with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson and I probably could have pulled that off.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks (ouch that hurts), there are a heck of a lot of words that contain GATE in them.

Did you ever play Scrabble?  Did you know that there are many websites on the internet dedicated to specific words?  It surprised me when I did a search for, ‘words that include gate’, and I found several websites dedicated to expanding the word gate, but I imagine that going to these sites when playing Scrabble would be considered cheating.  One site actually listed 242 words that contain gate in them, most of these words I had never seen before and I had no idea what their meanings were.

At this point I began thinking that I might ne in over my head, because I had bit off more than I could chew.  I don’t want to get into the intricacies of how Scrabble is played, but I will discuss which words are allowed and what ones are not.  Any word that is found in a standard English dictionary can be used in the game of Scrabble.  There are also Official Scrabble Dictionaries that can be purchased for more word options.  There are some words that are not allowed to be played and these include suffixes, prefixes and abbreviations.  Any word that requires the use of a hyphen or apostrophe cannot be played in the game. Any word that required the use of a capital letter is not allowed.  When playing an English version of the game, foreign words are not allowed to be placed on the board.  However, if the foreign word does appear in a standard English dictionary, it is allowed.  The reason for this is due to the fact that the word is spoken enough and is considered part of the English language.  I have placed two tables below to give you a better idea about prefixes and suffixes.

PREFIX	MEANING	EXAMPLES
de-	from, down, away reverse, opposite	decode, decrease
dis-	not, opposite, reverse, away	disagree, disappear
ex-	out of, away from, lacking, former	exhale, explosion
il-	not	illegal, illogical
im-	not, without	impossible, improper
in-	not, without	inaction, invisible
mis-	bad, wrong	mislead, misplace
non-	not	nonfiction, nonsense
pre-	before	prefix, prehistory
pro-	for, forward, before	proactive, profess, program
re-	again, back	react, reappear
un-	against, not, opposite	undo, unequal, unusual

 

SUFFIX	MEANING	EXAMPLES
-able	able to, having the quality of	comfortable, portable
-al	relating to	annual, comical
-ed	past tense	crossed, jumped
-er	comparative	bigger, stronger
-est	superlative	strongest, tiniest
-ful	full of	beautiful, grateful
-ible	forming an adjective	reversible, terrible
-ily	forming an adverb	eerily, happily, lazily
-ing	denoting an action, a material, or a gerund	acting, showing
-less	without, not affected by	friendless, tireless
-ly	forming an adjective	clearly, hourly
-ness	denoting a state or condition	kindness, wilderness
-y	full of, denoting a condition, or a diminutive	glory, messy, victory,

These are not all inclusive lists, they are short lists of the more common prefixes and suffixes that are often used.  Some of the interesting words that I found, where I actually knew their meaning and with spell checker engaged, I was able to get close enough to them are: Circumnavigate, Congregate, Conjugate, Corrugate, Delegate, Elongate, Fumigate, Instigate, Investigate, Interrogate, Irrigate, Litigate, Mitigate, Negate, Navigate, Obligate, Relegate, Subjugate and Surrogate.  I also found some compound words like Liftgate, Tollgate and one of my favorites Tailgate.