Just discovered another Scrabble trap, thanks to Charlotte's Web, which I'm currently rereading with Kendell. The word is "timothy", which the Scrabble dictionary defines in its usual terse manner as "a European grass". Dictionary.com's etymology implies that it's not limited to Europe:

1730-40; named after Timothy Hanson, American farmer who ( Read more... )

As a follow-up to an earlier entry, I've since thought of another four words that are spelled identically to their proper noun counterparts, only without the initial uppercase letter, and could conceivably lure someone into challenging you on their validity, if you played them in a game of Scrabble ( Read more... )

Or: proper nouns that aren't ( Read more... )