By Spiro Zavos
January 29th 2010 @ 12:56am
Scrabble is a five-lettered SPORT
Joyce Slaughter of Louisville, Ky., arranges her tiles. AP Photo/Bill Janscha
While my wife was in labour at Hammersmith Hospital in London for the birth of son number one, we passed the long hours of waiting by playing Scrabble. Such is the word-power and determination of Judy that she only succumbed to a defeat, after many victories, just before she was wheeled away to give birth.
My attitude to Scrabble was that it was a sort of one-on-one word game played by couples to fill in some time when there was nothing on television that night. Or there was no television set handy.
But an article in The New Yorker (19 January 2009) by a staff writer Judith Thurman has forced me to look at Scrabble in a new light. I now see it as a tough-minded game, intellectual and intuitive like chess, and with the same competitive edge to it.
Thurman has written an essay about her obsession with Scrabble which places this obsession in the history of the sport. There is, too, within this personal memoir, a fascinating history of how Scrabble emerged as a word game played by couples on sofas around the world to a sport that has its apex in three major tournaments.
Before reading this essay, I’d heard of Derryn Hinch’s book of useful words for Scrabble players, a compendium that contained several thousand words. According to Thurman, the USA and British Scrabble Associations have an agreed list of 267,751 words that Scrabblers can use in tournament play.
Some of these words include over 100 two-letter words like ‘aa’ and ‘zat’ (which competitors in international tournaments learn by heart like chess players rote-learning the main openings of a chess game). Apparently, too, there are 11 admissible ‘q’ words like ‘qat’ that do not start with a ‘qu’. I wonder if Qantas is one of those words.
Competitors apparently swot up on all these words, and hook words starting with ‘re’ and so on, rather like the kids swotting up for a Spelling Bee competition. They use flash cards and other memory aids to train up for the tournaments.
What they are trying to do is maximise the letters they have and not fail like Homer Simpson in a celebrated episode when he put down DO when he was holding the letters OXODIZE (American spelling).
According to Thurman there is a system of ranking for tournament players that takes into account victories and losses over higher-ranked and lower-ranked players.
There are three major Scrabble tournaments: The USA Scrabble Championship (with the winner earning $25,000), The World Championship (which was held in Mumbai in 2008) and The Thai International Tournament (which is the largest of the regional tournaments with 8,000 competitors in 2008).
The runner-up at the most recent World and USA Championships (and a winner in previous years) is a 42 year-old New Zealander, Nigel Richards, who should be rated – but isn’t yet – as one of that country’s greatest sportsmen.
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LeftArmSpinner said | January 29th 2010 @ 5:11am | Report comment
Queen Charlottes or Hammersmith Hospital. if the former, I know it well. two visits there for two boys of my own!!
Well, its very rare for a new sport to come along. new variations of existing sports: sure. Truly new ones: not many.
Mattwa said | January 29th 2010 @ 9:36am | Report comment
“Some of these words include over 100 two-letter words like ‘aa’ and ‘zat’ ”
Is ‘zat’ a two-letter word?
preciouspress said | January 29th 2010 @ 11:56am | Report comment
40 years ago when we lived in India, my wife and I played a lot of scrabble. Then she decided she wouldn’t put up with my slow play. Neither does she share my love of cricket. We haven’t yet got round to discussing the impact of ELVs.
Carl said | February 27th 2010 @ 6:02pm (2 weeks ago) | Report comment
The list of 257,751 words to which you refer is called (for esoteric historical reasons having nothing to do with either pigs or peas) SOWPODS. It is used for English language tournament play outside the U.S., Canada, Israel and Thailand; however, within those four nations a much smaller list, TWL, having only 178,691 words, is used.
You can view all of the words in these lists by visiting http://www.lexifind.com, selecting the word list you want, and then entering .* (a dot followed by a star) in the Freeplay Search column on the right (in the constraints field).
As it happens, there are actually 47 words in SOWPODS that start with a Q and which do not contain the sequence QU. These can be found by entering the constraint
Q[^QU][^Q]*
into the aforementioned Freeplay Search column.
Scrabble players are interested in these words because they are often getting stuck with a “rack” of letters that contains a Q but no U, and knowing these words (like QABALISTIC, QINGHAOSUS and QINDARKA) can be a lifesaver in such situations. It is therefore more to the point to view all words that have a Q but no U (not just words starting with a Q that have no QU). There are 70 such words (including MBAQANGAS and TSADDIQIM), which can be viewed by entering the constraint
[^U]*Q[^U]*
into the same Freeplay Search column.
@Mattwa: ZAT is not a Scrabble word and is evidently a typographical error. I’m guessing the author meant to write “ZA,” a word that is short for “PIZZA,” that is one of the more recent Scrabble words to be approved for tournament play. There are exactly 124 such 2-letter words in the SOWPODS word list, and they can all be viewed by typing .. (dot dot) into the aforementioned Freeplay Search field. ZA (and its two-letter counterpart, QI, which was added about the same time) are very significant additions to the Scrabble lexicon, since both Z and Q are worth 10 points, the highest number assigned to a letter in Scrabble, and two-letter words are exceptionally useful for making multiple words by playing a word above, below or to the side of another word. If the Z or the Q is a part of two words made during a single play, then its points are added to the score for that play twice.
–Carl