I'm confused as to the purpose of all the zeros. Since this is far, far from a complete list of all English words, what's the difference between a word not bein

I'm confused as to the purpose of all the zeros. Since this is far, far from a complete list of all English words, what's the difference between a word not being on the list vs a word being a zero? I can kind of see "was this a word they considered and scored, vs. not considered?" when trying to assess whether the project is comprehensive, but from a programming standpoint, it just seems like it's going to have a lot of useless overhead, since by the time I'm looking up the word I don't care whether it's a zero or a miss. (I also find the scoring of "2" for many of the words to be weird, like "yank," "chug," "looser" etc. as they can all have perfectly normal meanings.)