Learn English – valid English word for “playability”

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I edit a lot of writing on the topic of cue sports, like pool and billiards. The word "playability" comes up a lot.

For example, if one is trying to explain that a pool cue is excellent in feel and performance, one might say: "My new custom pool cue has great playability."

I don't believe "playability" is a word, and if that is the case, what could be used in its place?

A similar example is the word "drivability" which I believe was invented by marketers in the 1970's to describe how well a car drives.

Both of these are commonly not found in spell checking dictionaries so I want to check here for whether or not they are legitimate in general writing.

Best Answer

Both 'playability' and 'drivability' are legitimate words and work perfectly fine in general writing (already well-accepted in their specific sports areas).

  • spellcheckers have errors, both bad entries, those that won't be recognized by most people, and missing entries, those that would be recognized by most but aren't in the list.
  • spellcheckers mostly work by finite lists, but there are many more words that can legitimately created by adding suffixes on to them that aren't (yet?) listed in a dictionary. Of course some legitimate suffix-adding rules just don't work because there is an existing word that suffices (eg 'friendness' is not a word because 'friendship' already does).
  • 'playability' is in some online dictionaries (see the Free Dictionary or dictionary.com; don't trust wiktionary, people will put anything in there)
  • similarly with 'drivability'
  • Google ngrams seems to confirm that 'drivability' began its more common usage in the '60s

Wordness (that doesn't sound much like a word but it'll do for now) is pretty slippery near the boundary. Both these words are well on the acceptable side.

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