Description acceptable

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Blurting · Changing your answer · Conferring
Description acceptable · Leading articles
Prompts · Recognition

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Moot

"Description acceptable" is a warning occasionally appended to the beginning of tossups or the end of bonus parts, to indicate that the desired answer may not have a proper name and/or that the answer line allows some leniency with giving a more common generic answer rather than the proper name of the thing being asked about. This represents an exception to the general principle that things have names.

Questions that can only be answered with a description are sometimes given the warning "Description required" instead.

History

The use of "Description acceptable" became more standard in collegiate circuit sets in the early 2010s.

Though some tossups at 2014 ICT had the label, NAQT has banned the use of "Description acceptable" in its question sets since 2014.

Theory

Strictly speaking, an answer must explicitly satisfy all clues in a question. However, convention allows for leniency in certain cases, such as accepting answers that are referenced in specific clues but may be too specific elsewhere.

The "Description acceptable" warning is one way to formalize this leniency. For answers that have a well-known proper name, no warning is necessary, as players are expected to provide the correct name. For answers with a proper name but a more commonly known description (e.g. "the boat from the beginning of Heart of Darkness" instead of "the Nellie") or for answers with no proper name, a warning is often expected. Without this warning, players may not realize they have sufficient knowledge to answer a question if they only remember a description rather than a proper name. The adoption of "Description acceptable" has helped broaden answerlines while reducing unnecessary confusion.

The exact meaning of "Description acceptable" has been disputed. In particular, when an answer has no proper name at all, questions may utilize either "Description acceptable" or "Description required", as the question must be answered with the description, so it is technically "acceptable", though "Description required" is more explicit. Rarely, questions will not include any instruction for such an answer, with the reasoning that the only correct answer is a description, so no warning is appropriate.