vocabulary

How To Win At Scrabble

Sure, I’m giving away a secret but future victories will be even sweeter knowing that my opponent could have been on the same level as I am in terms of obscure word knowledge. Courtesey of Wired Mag’s “How To” issue, here are recommended “words to know” from John Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association:
azo, jo, ka, ki, qaid, qat, qi, xi, xu, za, zin and zoa.
Also on the list for when you have too few or too many vowels:
hm, hmm and ourie.
When I pull a “zin” on someone, when he or she is complaining that it isn’t a word, I’m simply going to say “next time read my blog.”
Via Wired.

3 thoughts on “How To Win At Scrabble

  1. Good one.
    I used to play Scrabble with my second husband, who shall not be named here, every Sunday. We thought that the *only* way of learning how to play Scrabble and learning all the words is to play it with an open Scrabble Dictionary.
    So, when it comes to playing Scrabble, it’s mostly about character fitting. This is how it works:
    1. We both eye on those solid red squares.
    2. We then look at our tiles and then browse through the entire Scrabble dictionary looking for combination so that we will fill in the space so we get multiple words at any time.
    3. Our turns take on average 15-30 mins each.
    4. I don’t mind that quite a bit because we have plenty of wine and cheese during those times.
    5. I learned in college from a linguistic major that if you want to get your new word stuck in your head, try to use it in a sentence everyday for a week. So, we try our best to utilize these very ka and za in our daily living–using those words are in fact the hard part of this all, and *that* task is not even part of the game.
    6. I don’t remember any of them now as I no longer have a Scrabble-addict living with me anymore.
    7. Now I occasionally go to Washington Square and play chess with chess addicts. There’s a lot of swearing going on there. It makes it fun.
    I think that Icon should start having blitz tournaments.
    Cheers,
    See-ming

  2. Other good ones are whatever a particular someone decided to make up and include in my STrabble computer dictionary database 😉

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