QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Etymology is the origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning.

In the beginning it can be hard to come up with valid words because the way most of us learned and store vocabulary in our brain is by context. Succeeding at SAYWORD!®️ requires you to reorganize your vocabulary based on common roots. The more you play KNOCKOUT, the more you will literally rewire your brain to access word families. You don't have to be smart to play. SAYWORD!®️ makes you smart. We suggest playing KNOCKOUT first before trying any of the other games.

A word is valid when both the approximate spelling and logical root are accurate. When this problem occurs, people are often running into false cognates or misidentified roots based on spelling. Usually the recommended dictionaries are enough to determine an accurate answer, but occasionally you will find that it is difficult to arrive at a definitive answer. This is an inherent part of the game that we decided not to remove for 3 reasons.

1) The discussions about the etymology of a word brings richness and engagement to language. 

2) The debates and resolutions help to develop Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).

3) This is often where the laughter comes into play! People create unique and creative explanations for wildly illogical answers.

A false cognate is a word in one language that looks or sounds similar to a word in another language but is not related.

Sometimes a root or morpheme may take on a different spelling due to historical influences, the connecting of morphemes, or to accommodate rules of English. Sometimes plurality creates these alternate spellings such as the case with SELF becoming SELVES in the plural form.

When playing BOX or STACK & STEAL, the concept is to connect word families, not to completely spell out a word or have ALL roots to a word. The "missing" letters are usually vowels which sometimes act as connectors between morphemes. For example, the word SCi-ENT-I-FIC-AL-LY is made up of 5 morphemes and 1 connector, "I" which carries no meaning.

Regardless of age, the suggested reading level is around 3rd grade. To make the game more accessible to younger players, stick to playing KNOCKOUT and use the cards that have the lowest point value. Game play is generally easy for young players. Their only hurdle is understanding that the meaning is more important than the spelling. For example, younger players tend to use "DUCK" as a possible answer for a word containing the root, "DUC" meaning to lead. Although they understand that they have to fill in the rest of the word, they often do so based on spelling. With very young children you may want to allow this until they can grasp the deeper concept of KNOCKOUT.

There is no Spanish translated version but many of the cards in the deck can be played in other languages.  The card "NAT" works in English with words such as NATURAL, NATURE, NATION, but it can also work in Spanish for words such as NATURO, NATURALMENTE, and NATIVO. In Potuguese, words such as NATureza, NATural, NATiva, NAÇão are possible answers. This works in Italian and French as well. Sometimes the spellings are even identical! These common spelling help English speakers understand other Latin based languages as well.

You can get a copy of SAYWORD! on our online store, from amazon, or you can try to win a free copy by playing weekly online games of SAYWORD via social media.

We want to  break English words down into morphemes so players begin understanding of how English words are constructed.

This is a double entendre. One meaning of this phrase is that each time you play the game, the outcomes will vary. New words will emerge. The other meaning alludes to how playing SAYWORD!®️ reshapes the mind. Once people start looking at words based on etymology and morphology, they find it hard to look at words without the urge to break them down or seek the roots.

A book is a group of cards. In the BOX variant of the game, players create books of two or more cards that form all or part of a word. Each player is expected to keep their books face down and separate from each other to be easily counted. This can be done a number of ways but stacking books in a zig zag pattern seems to be the most popular method.

In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

Affixes are additional letters placed at the beginning or end of a root, stem, or word, or in the body of a word, to modify its meaning. The four types are prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes.