Lexigame Community
General Category => Words => Topic started by: birdy on November 07, 2019, 11:07:34 AM
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In the recent 7x7 "Unwritten" game, unwrit was not accepted. Granted, probably only a poet would use it, but it is a word.
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Yes, it is a word, meaning unwritten. But is it a bit too obscure for us to use?
It's listed in Wiktionary, flagged as "archaic, poetic". They give one example, from the 19th century American poet George Henry Calvert.
It doesn't seem to be in any of the other freely-accessible online dictionaries. It's also absent from the Shorter Oxford, which I consider to be about as inclusive as we ought to be in our word list. It is in the full OED, with the most recent citation from 1656.
I did find a few other usage examples. One was in Memories and Portraits, a collection of essays by Robert Louis Stevenson: "I know nothing to compare with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the world all vanity."
Both the OED and Wiktionary aim to be all-inclusive in their coverage of the English language. We don't. Incorporating all the words known to unabridged dictionaries would probably result in a substantial increase in the size of our already huge word list.
I feel unwrit is somewhere below our obscurity threshold.
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Okay, my sorrow over this omission will remain unwrit. :D