It used to be 102 two letter words that were allowed, memorising all of them was not difficult, you would just know them if you played fairly regularly. Occasio

It used to be 102 two letter words that were allowed, memorising all of them was not difficult, you would just know them if you played fairly regularly. Occasional players (who you probably wouldn't be playing with if you played regularly) would not know the 102 two letter words. Slightly more to remember than the alphabet, but anything wrong on the board would be easy to spot as wrong, no risk in making a challenge. As for dictionaries, mobile phones and apps changed everything. However, before these 'advances' the dictionary to use was the correct Scrabble one. What I liked about the proper Scrabble dictionary was that none of the words were explained. So you could play words beyond your normal level of spoken English without knowing what they meant, but you would know they were in the proper Scrabble dictionary. So you could have 'ax' and not know what it meant or extend it on the next go to 'axon' with no idea what that meant. You did know from previous games that this was legit and that was all that mattered. To people not in the game this dictionary seemed absurd. The language had morphed into code. A code that you had to know if you were ever to have a chance of using complete 7 letter 'laydowns' several times in a game and do those cool two letter joins to make such things possible.