Mike, I presume when you say, "allow any word that is shown unhyphenated in any authoritative dictionary", you mean either hyphenated or unhyphenated?
When the 6th edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOD) came out in 2007 there was considerable interest in the fact that thousands of hyphens had been dropped. In that dictionary
singsong is given as a single word, with the hyphenated version as an alternative, while
ding-dong is listed with the hyphen, but with the single-word form as an option. However,
ping-pong is shown only in the hyphenated form. (Although it says it's a proprietary name in the US, written with a capital
P at the start - I never knew that.)
At the time this dictionary came out, Ben Zimmer wrote
an interesting blog post on the OUP site about the evolution of hyphenated words, and some of the reasons hyphens are retained. The trend to drop hyphens from many compound words is not new: he quotes Keats writing
to-day and
to-morrow, saying, "Those hyphens are long gone, and I doubt anyone misses them."
The thing is, I'm not sure what problem we're trying to solve. There are many dictionaries, and I dare say no two of them have an identical collection of entries. The words acceptable in Chihuahua are those included in the Chihuahua lexicon. It's easy to find out whether a word is in that lexicon by trying to play it. If a player wants to set themselves the challenge of achieving a high score with a 100% hit rate, good luck to them. But if you could find out in advance whether any particular word is allowed by looking it up in an "authoritative" dictionary, the challenge would evaporate. Maintaining a 100% hit rate would become a tedious clerical chore. Or am I missing something?
