OSKI and non words

CHIMLEYS- no dictionary results

CHUMLEYS- no dictionary results

I was slaughtered with these two words:

http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/game/game.jsp?gid=1225297

Seriously, where do people come up with these words? :)

trial and error (that's how I do it. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, nothing. Next.)

You could enter a bunch of letters you might want to use and try the 'super search' here, or just enter one and one word instead of having to click it out by trial and error. It'll essentially be the same thing but will free up some time for cocaine and strippers. Either way it's going to be more of a brute force stamina challenge / time drain. With SOWPODS anagramming you can generate variations almost endlessly, unlike most other games (like Go) where there'll be a very low limit on how many moves your brain will want to bother with before it says "ok, I can't think of any more variations, let's just play". But given 20 random letters and enough autism you could sit there for a year and still have stuff left you want to check.

If you *really* want rating points you just program a simple bot (or some scripts to generate regular expressions that you filter the SOWPODS word list through). That suggestion is of course not serious, but some will enjoy that challenge too. (Programming a good bot is a sort of puzzle in itself.) So playing English word games competitively online you're going to be playing against other programmers / bots / word list manipulators and very few of the words either of you play will be "English".

I insist on using just my brain and play only words I know. What an idiot!

Indeed! I do the same, but will do some trial-and-error word look-ups if I have the time. I don't think it really matters what each person does, as long as they enjoy doing it, but then I think that's what everyone does anyway. Whether that be just putting down the first 5- or 6-letter word that they find, trial-and-error repetition for half an hour, programming a bot, spending hours obsessively searching for that 8-letter word that just *has* to be there only to find...nothing (or once a year when you find MALODOROUS -- ahh, so sexy).

Most of us wouldn't keep playing these games if our brains didn't release little chemical rewards every time we find a good move, win a game, or the little numbers increase. We're all addicted to *something*. For some, maybe their brains only reward them if they follow some arbitrary "play ethics" they've adopted (and feel annoyed/frustrated if they're robbed of this chemical reward by an opponent who doesn't agree on the same ethics); for others, maybe their brains reward them simply from beating the system no matter the means. Lord knows about those who get no reward at all, and for whom winning is *truly* the same as losing. (And not just in the New Age-y proverb sense.) Some focus on objective lists and percentiles, others on internal and subjective feelings of skill or mastery, others have no focus at all...?

I enjoy this diversity and don't really care what my opponent does, but I understand that many prefer to play only against moves generated by humans, or might even have preferences as to how their human opponents generate moves. But sadly it will just lead to frustration because it's impossible to police it online like this. On the internet, no matter the strength of your logic or the soundness of your reasoning, you can always find a hundred people who vehemently disagree and another thousand who just don't care at all.