It was a sign of the times. On a Saturday evening long ago, four of us first-year law school classmates decided mid-Scrabble game that a misspelled word summarily costing you a turn was cruel and unusual and denied due process. So we instituted a new rule: you could play any letters in any order provided you could offer a semi-plausible definition of your alleged word.

Now, a half-century later, there’s Crossplay, the one-on-one, online New York Times Scrabble-like game where, without penalty, you can put down letters until the technology confirms an actual word. Then for edification you can look it up.

In Crossplay most traditional Scrabble rules apply. So, no names or proper nouns.

But during an early game I conjured state Sen. Jo Comerford and my cousin Cate. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Many names actually work fine, including Al — an Indian mulberry tree, also spelled aal; Kay, the letter; Lea, a meadow; Oscar, a freshwater cichlid fish; Romeo, an eponym; and, of course, Victor, who gets the spoils.

As for proper nouns, Lima works as a bean, not Peru’s capital. And Boston also is acceptable — not the city but a type of 19th century card game with something called a “misery round.” Red Sox fans, Roger that?

Remember, no abbreviations. But consider OS, the shorthand for Operating System. Without caps, os means an orifice, an opening, a mouth. Yes, words comes out of our os. As does a baby. By the way, the plural of os is ora, not oses.

Which reminds me. With a lot of esses or ees you might reflect on esse — the fundamental nature of things.

Continuing down this spiritual path, you’ll have time (there’s no clock in Crossplay) to meditate on the ba or ka, the eternal soul in ancient Egypt, and qi, also spelled ki, the life force in Buddhism, as you intone om (or ohm if you’re into electricity). Od! (a mild interjection)! Gor! (see od) Hmm.

Crossplay has also taught me that you can tap for spinel, a gemstone, not a misspelling, and that heme is where the heart is — it’s a molecule in hemoglobin.

No foreign words. Except for loanwords. Loanwords? Sounds smelly? Try eau de cologne.

Short words are super useful because they allow you to make words vertically and horizontally at the same time.

Two letters can make the board come alive with the sound of music (do re, mi, fa, so (or sol) la, ti. That said, I’m partial to two-letter words without a consonant. Vowels only —  really?

Really. Aa will impress your geologist friends (it’s a kind of lava); ae, your Scottish ones (literally — it means one); ai, animal lovers (it’s a sloth); oe, meteorological buffs — ( it’s a whirlwind in the Faroe Islands, part of Demark. Hopefully Trump won’t invade). And oi, your Jewish friends — an alternative spelling of oy. Enough already!

Obviously this game can make you a person of letters. Aitch, ee, el, pee.

After short words, I Googled “long English words” and discovered that in a standard dictionary the longest is pneumono/ultra/microscopic/silico/volcano/coniosis, a 45-letter lung disease. Also, the chemical name for the protein titin contains 189,819 letters and takes 3.5 hours to say.

Contrast the one-point value of vowels (wye is worth four) with the big points for consonants like jay, cue, zee and ex. Hungry to rax (stretch) your vocabulary and rack up points? Try za, short for pizza. Talk about playing with your food.

Other useful categories: letters in other languages, like mem — Hebrew and mu — Greek, and units in foreign currencies, e.g., xu in Vietnam.

More surprises: quean historically is a disreputable woman, and ne or nae in Scottish English means no. Oh ne!

For me playing Crossplay has clarified that expanding my vocabulary in the only language I (sort of) speak will be a long, long road.

Here’s how long. Including scientific terms, ancient words and those that suffer from desuetude (a term I first encountered in law school), there may be over a million English words.

Merriam Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists some 470,000, the Oxford English Dictionary a tad over 170,000.

Impressive! Until you read that the number of words in Sanskrit is 1.5 to 2 million and potentially infinite.

And that a typical newspaper column has 300-450 unique words, depending on how you count lemmas (word roots). Talk about humbling. But I digress.

Word games are distractions. Given the state of the country, distractions are, I submit, a mental health necessity.

And if during a game thoughts of Trump should intrude (see above on Denmark), you can spell yecch, yech or gank (steal, defraud) if you can’t igg (ignore) him.

A final word: to you for indulging this distraction, reading this column, I say ta (thank you).

Oh goodness, I almost forgot — Cate and Jo. Both valid words, I discovered. Cate means a choice food or delicacy, and Jo in Scottish English means sweetheart, dear or beloved. Our elder daughter’s name is Jo, so for almost 43 years we’ve known what it means — albeit only in our hearts.

Bill Newman, a Northampton-based civil rights attorney and radio show host, writes a monthly column.