Our puzzling group's Target rules

A group of us compete in a friendly spirit over each Saturday Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) newspaper's Target puzzle. For the benefit of all of us in the group, here are the rules we follow.

Valid words

Only valid words are counted in the final tally. To be valid, a word must:

1. Contain the middle letter, and,
2. Contain at least four letters (including the middle letter) from the nine, and only letters from the nine. A letter may be contained in a valid word at most the number of times in which it occurs in the nine letters. For example, if "N" occurs three times in the nine letters, then it may be used in a valid word either zero (unless it is the middle letter, in which case it must occur at least once), one, two, or three times - and no more, and,
3. Have at least one dictionary sense in which it does not start with a capital letter, i.e., a sense in which it is not a proper noun, and,
4. Not include any punctuation such as hyphens and apostrophes, and,
5. Not have any dictionary sense in which it is either (a) a plural noun ending in "S", or, (b) a verb form ending in "S" except when in its infinitive form (so, CARESS as an infinitive form is valid, but CARESSES, not being an infinitive form, is invalid), and,
6. Occur in our ad hoc dictionary based upon an old list of valid Scrabble words. Words can be looked up in our ad hoc dictionary here.

Variances from the SMH rules

Note that our rules differ slightly from those of the SMH in that:

1. We do not exclude informal, colloquial, or slang words as the SMH does: so long as a word occurs in our ad hoc dictionary (criterion #6), and also meets all other criteria, it is valid, and,
2. Any official or reference dictionary stipulated by the SMH is superseded by our ad hoc dictionary per criterion #6 (but see "Missing ad hoc dictionary words" below).
3. We permit verbs ending in "S" when in their infinitive form.

Speculative look-ups permitted

Note also that speculative look-ups in our ad hoc dictionary are permitted. In other words, it is OK to semi-randomly/intuitively put letters together and then look up in our ad hoc dictionary whether the potential word thus formed is valid. There is also no limit on the number of speculative look-ups.

Submission of results

Word lists must nominally be submitted (by email or other agreed means) to Laird by midnight of the first Thursday (AEST) following the Saturday on which the puzzle was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. This is "nominal" because lists can still be submitted up until the results email is sent around (by Laird), which is often not immediately after midnight Thursday.

Placings

Placings (first to last) are determined by these three criteria in order of priority:

1. Word lists with at least one valid nine-letter word beat word lists without any valid nine-letter word.
2. Word lists with a higher number of valid words beat those with a lower number of valid words.
   1. In the event in which it would serve to potentially differentiate placings, and only in that event, additional nine-letter words increase the word count of the puzzler finding them by five (on top of their inherent count of one). More specifically, the event applies for a given puzzler when their nine-letter word count exceeds the minimum number of nine-letter words found by all puzzlers who found at least one nine-letter word, and only the nine-letter words found beyond that minimum accrue the extra five-word count (each). If, however, no other puzzler found even one nine-letter word, then the puzzler's word count is not increased, because placings are already differentiated by rule #1 above. (The aim of this somewhat convoluted rule is to avoid changing word counts so far as possible).
3. Word lists submitted earlier beat those submitted later. Date+time of submission is taken to be the date+time of the arrival of the emailed word list in Laird's inbox, and, in Laird's case, it is taken to be the first occasion on which he deliberately looks at any submitted word list, or, explicitly - to himself - declares that he's done (his honesty in this respect has to be taken on trust, but then, this whole puzzling game is based on trust given the undetectable possibilities for cheating!).

For example, if two separate puzzlers each submit a word list containing a valid nine-letter word and the same number of valid words in total, then the puzzler who submitted their list earliest by email will be deemed to have placed higher than the other puzzler.

So far, these criteria have been sufficient to uniquely determine placings. If we ever come across a scenario in which the submitted word lists of two puzzlers are the same in all three respects - very unlikely! - then we will have to make up additional criteria.

Missing ad hoc dictionary words

Any puzzler, on encountering a valid word not presently found in our ad hoc dictionary, can, when submitting their results, simply supply a link to an entry for the word in a legit online dictionary (where "legit" has a commonsense meaning in this context), or simply a legit definition from a legit dictionary, and the word is then, prior to the compiling of results, permanently added to our ad hoc dictionary.

Official SMH solution words auto-added to dictionary

If the official SMH solutions contain any word(s) not in our ad hoc dictionary, then that/those word(s) are added to our dictionary before the results are compiled.