I began by playing the robot at the Scrabulous site. That was certainly an eye-opening and degrading experience as it quickly racked up huge scores using words I’d never heard of. I was used to family games where we never bothered to keep score.

Over the course of many humiliating losses, I began to consult the online dictionary that comes with Scrabulous. Faced with either all vowels or all consonants, one gets a little desperate against an unseen, highly superior opponent who has access to an enormous vocabulary of obscure words. I never thought of it as ‘cheating’. During family games, we automatically google if someone comes up with a questionable word.

Since three of my Facebook fellow players are from across the pond, they produce words from time to time that are unfamiliar to me, but which I accept without question. It’s all for fun, after all. They do talk funny over there. But then I guess so do we.

But I would never call consulting a dictionary cheating. This particular one does not allow the word ‘toga’, for example, which is puzzling.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to follow the progress of the Hasbro lawsuit against Scrabulous.