Tainted victory

A win by the substantial margin of more than 100, around 300 to 200 this afternoon, powerfully fuelled by 'erotica' scoring 87 on the bottom line, including the bonus of 50 for using all seven of one's tiles.

A tainted victory though, as although BH did not challenge and so the word stands, it is not, as it turns out when I checked later, in our first edition OED. It is in Webster's, about a hundred years younger, so the word must have come into regular use relatively recently. And it is not as if, on our house rules anyway, there is any penalty for a failed challenge. As a child, I think we played that a challenger had to be the player to left of the challenged player and that he or she lost their go if their challenge failed. Perhaps we took the game more seriously then than we do now, and needed to push back against vexatious challenging.

On the other hand, BH took great pleasure in challenging my subsequent attempt at 'zoa' top left. My thinking was that one had protozoa and metazoa so there ought to be zoa. OED - with the last volume top right in the snap above - ruled otherwise, only including 'zoea' but marking it as not naturalised and so not allowed (double vertical bar). While according to Webster's online a zoea is 'a free-swimming planktonic larval form of many decapod crustaceans and especially crabs that has a relatively large cephalothorax, conspicuous eyes, and fringed antennae and mouthparts'. I forfeited my go.

Webster's print also allows 'zoa' as the plural of 'zoon', which seems to be a fancy word in Zoology for an egg. There is probably something special about this sort of egg, but I couldn't make out what that was.

PS 1: only slightly tainted as I won by more than the tainted 87.

PS 2: for the avoidance of doubt, using all one's tiles at the end of the game, when one has less than seven tiles, does not qualify for the bonus.