The idea of allowing all plurals has been discussed before - we even had
a poll on the question, which was in favour of keeping things as they are. Of course, the views expressed then don't have to decide the issue for all time - there have been many new forumites since then and, in any case, we're entitled to change our minds.
However, there does seem to be a lot of merit in the opinion voiced by a few in the earlier discussion, and in this topic, that allowing all plurals would just add a tedious chore whenever there's an
S among the letters. On this issue, I think Dave's remark about the onerous task of playing letters via a voice recognition program probably has a wider relevance. Because what is an all-too-obvious burden to Dave may well be a more subliminal annoyance to players using keyboard or mouse. Let's face it, the purpose of any game is to entertain, so anything that imposes boring repetitive tasks is to be avoided where possible.
[A digression: I recently read in a book about game design that philosopher Bernard Suits has offered the definition "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The most efficient way of getting a ball into a hole in the ground is to carry it to just above the hole and drop it in, not to start from a great distance away and whack the ball with a variety of sticks. In the case of Chihuahua, the most efficient way of finding nine-letter words composed of a given set of letters would be to use an anagram dictionary or website, and there are also high productivity ways of finding all the other words. But the whole point of the game is to use your knowledge and mental powers (although there seem to be a few people who haven't grasped that). If it were a different type of game, dexterity in clicking tiles might be part of the challenge, as it is in games with a timer, like Bookworm et al. But Chihuahua is designed to challenge the mental powers only, so the mechanics of entering the words should be as unobtrusive as possible.]
Allowing all plurals would not necessarily result in bigger puzzles. If we kept the existing method of creating puzzles, the number of common words would always fall within a certain range. So a nine-letter word containing an
S that would not be used at present because it doesn't make enough words might be allowable once plurals were added in. Meanwhile, other words might be ruled out because they produced too many words when plurals are included. But in any case, the situation would remain that the skill factor in the puzzle would be watered down.
So if we assume for now that most plurals ending in
S will continue to be excluded, how should we handle the special cases such as the
pants tribe of words?
I always intended that a plural with no singular should be allowed, even where there is another word spelled exactly as the singular would be if it existed. In other words, the existence of the word
more does not rule out the word
mores. This can apply even where the words are related in derivation and meaning, as with
new and
news -
new is not the singular of
news, and
news is not the plural of
new. Since the forum started, we have added
afters to the allowable words, using the same reasoning.
I don't know if there are any such cases among the clothing plurals listed earlier in this topic.
Brief is usually an adjective, with no plural, but
briefs can be sets of documents prepared for a lawyer. A
knicker can be a marble made of baked clay.
So this is where things get interesting - the situation Viz was talking about where two words are written in the same way, as in
knickers, underwear and
knickers, marbles. In this category too, there have always been some plural words allowed in Chihuahua, in cases where the word that would be disallowed is extremely rare. I mentioned a couple of examples in an earlier discussion:
For example HOOVES is the plural of HOOF and also of HOOVE (a disease of cattle). Since the second meaning seems very obscure, HOOVES is allowed. In fact even GOES comes into this category, because there is a word GOE - apparently an archaic version of GO - but it would be ludicrous to exclude GOES on that account.
This the reason both STIE and STIES are allowed (an example that comes up in the puzzle quite often), STIES as the plural of STY. I presume STIE is an obscure variant of STYE.
In the process of considering various candidate words over recent weeks, we seemed to move to the position that the disallowed word didn't need to be especially rare - it was sufficient that it be a different word from the one under consideration. Even so, I think most of the words we admitted are more common than their alter egos.
Does, as a form of the verb
do, is one of the most frequently used words in the language - certainly much more common than
does, female deers.
Blues, the mood or music form, is more commonly used than
blues, shades of blue (or, in Australia, arguments). And I think the same goes for
lees,
meths,
shingles and
mons. However, the argument is not applicable to one word that we recently decided to accept (although it hasn't been added to the list yet):
hives, in the bee dwelling sense, is probably at least as common a word as
hives, the medical condition.
If we used a rarity criterion, I think we would allow
knickers, but not
pants. But trying to apply some such rule to a long list of words would undoubtedly raise numerous borderline cases.
I think we should keep discussing these issues, but I'll finish up by outlining some of the other groups of words that might have a claim to being allowed. In my investigations to date I've found:
- About 40 words ending with ics, e.g. acoustics
- About 20 words ending with ings, e.g. combings
- About 30 words that are not plurals at all, e.g. besides
- About 70 other words that seem to have no singular, ranging from amends (as in "making amends") to yaws (a disease)
