Ok Is Not Okay

Last night I was playing Scrabble with two friends and I played the word "ok" (commonly spelled entirely with majuscules as OK) and my opponent decided to challenge me on it (I would like to comment that during the game we allowed several ficticious or non-English words such as aled and ozo (from עוזר) respectively, by agreeing not to challenge them; I'm not a crazy Scrabble-guy). It turned out that according to our 1978 Scrabble dictionary, ok is not a word, but the argued as less standard variant okay is. I was quite surprised to find this, but after some thought I decided that the Scrabble dictionary is a bizarre corupus as it is, so I shouldn't be too shocked. I double-checked with the contemporary online Scrabble dictionary, and it is the same in this regard.

It's strange to me that something as solidly lexicalized as ok is not considered a word by anyone, but all sorts of archaisms, non-standard spellings, clearly non-English words, and all sorts of onomatopoeia are allowed. Greek letters and solfège are also usual inclusions. While it's nice to have a clear and easy way to settle disagreements by agreeing on a dictionary beforehand, it's just too easy to want to argue with the source. It's the same with the OED or the Diccionario REAL, that they have such broad inclusion rules, that it's hard for them to be useful as an indicator of a word's validity. I even try to avoid using them sometimes, just so I don't have to deal with all of the archaisms and variants. Anyway, I lost 28 points and my turn from that, and ultimately would up losing the game, with well over 200 points, by 3 points to the guy who challenged me.