One of the first times I met Andy’s family, we played Scrabble. I used the word “orbicular.” One of my not-yet-as-of-then-in-laws challenged this word, looked it up in the dictionary, and made me take back my wonderful word when it wasn’t in the book. For ten years now I have kept that word as my own. Every now and then I would say it just to hear its wonderful sound: orbicular! But I still carried the shame of trying to scrabble a word that did not exist.
Today I am vindicated. In Chapter 1 of my Master Gardener text, I came across that word again. Orbicular, my friends, is one of many leaf blade shapes. When I read that word, I let out a yelp of joy and rolled my chair over to my keyboard to do a dictionary search. Sure enough, orbicular is all over the online dictionaries. What sort of dictionary were Andy’s parents using, anyhow?
I want a recount on that Scrabble match.
Many of the words around today were not in dictionaries 25 to 35 years ago. Perhaps you should check on the copy write date of the book that was used.
I too like that word! It has a round feeling to it.
You should have had the points…
25 or 30 years old sounds about right – if I had to guess, the Master Dictionary they used was from the early 80s.
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Dear Carol, You must have been playing that Scrabble game with someone else. That word is in both of the dictionaries we have owned forever.
Hm. Maybe it was “orbity?” It was something about orbs. There goes my exciting story about a really neat word.