Tidbits Unscrambles Scrabble

If you're among the millions of folks around the globe who love playing the fascinating game of Scrabble, this week’s issue of Tidbits is for you. And whether you’re a Scrabble fan or not, pull up a chair and join us as we unpack our tiles and spell out some interesting facts about this challenging word game that we’ll bet you never knew!

• Worldwide, Scrabble is the fifth most popular board game, coming in after chess, checkers, backgammon, and Monopoly. It’s the second most popular game In the U.S. after Monopoly, and in Britain it’s ranked number one. About a third of American homes own a Scrabble game, while more than half of all households in Great Britain do.

SCRABBLE FACTS

• Scrabble is sold in 121 countries and comes in 31 languages, including Welsh..

• English Scrabble comes with 100 tiles, but Portuguese and Italian have 120 tiles because their languages are more complex.

• Experts say that French is the easiest language to play, because there are so many words that can be expanded by adding a single “E” or “S.” German is said to be the most difficult because it’s hard to turn a short word into a longer word. There was once a debate if Germans should be allowed to use eight tiles in their rack instead of the standard seven, but in the end they got stuck with the original seven.

• Spanish Scrabble has a tile with two Ls on it, pronounced as a “Y” sound. The Dutch have a tile with an “I” and a “J” side by side, and the Catalan language, spoken in areas of Spain, has a tile with two Ls with a dot in between.

Tiles from Scrabble's Spanish language version.

• In English, the letter which occurs most frequently is “E” and therefore each Scrabble game contains 12 of them. In second place is the letter “A” with nine. But the Malaysian version contains 19 of the “A” tiles, which constitutes 20% of the total tiles used in the game. This is the most of any single letter used in any version of the game. In English Scrabble, 42 percent of the tiles are vowels, but that includes all five vowels.

• By contrast, there is only one each of “J” “K” “Q” “X” and “Z” in the English version.

• Languages spoken in both China, and Japan do not translate into Scrabble tiles.

SCRABBLE-OIDS

• The world’s largest game of Scrabble as certified by Guinness World Records took place in Wembley Stadium, London, England to celebrate its 50th birthday in 1998. Each fiberglass tile measured six feet (1.8 m) square and took two strong men to lift.

• To celebrate Scrabble’s 60th birthday which coincided with Prince Charles’s 60th birthday, a large portrait of Prince Charles was made solely from Scrabble tiles. It was created by artist Lizzie Sanders. She used different colored tiles from different types of games: white plastic tiles, black plastic tiles, and the classic wooden tiles.

A portrait of Prince Charles made with a variety of Scrabble tiles, to commemorate his 60th birthday and Scrabble's 60th birthday.

• In 1992, Franklin Mint commissioned and produced a version of Scrabble featuring 24k gold-plated tiles.

• There is a Deluxe Scrabble with easy-to-see bold print for individuals with low vision.

• Underwater Scrabble was played in England in 1995 as a fundraiser. Special laminated boards were used and the tiles had lead weights attached.

• If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were laid end to end, they would stretch around the world at the equator twice.

• When the 52 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage in Iran in 1979, they made a Scrabble game out of paper and cardboard squares to help pass the time.

• During an expedition to Antarctica in 1985, Lieutenant Commander Waghorn fell down a crevasse, breaking a leg. He was successfully winched to the surface of the ice but could not travel. After his broken leg was set, Lance Corporal Terry Gill set up a small tent and kept him company while the rest of the crew went for help. The two men huddled together, entertaining themselves with a portable game of Scrabble while they waited. Five days later, they were both pulled from the ice by a helicopter during a brief break in the stormy weather. No word on who won most of the games.

SCRABBLE TOURNAMENTS

• Each year since 1973, the Scrabble Players Championship hosts a National Scrabble Championship in a major U.S. city. The tournament attracts more than 500 skilled adult players who compete in 31 rounds of one-onone play over a five day period.

• Today there are a variety of Scrabble tournaments, including the World Scrabble Championship, the Youth Scrabble Tournament, the School Scrabble Tournament, and innumerable regional Scrabble championships.

• Competitive games tend to be a lot faster than the games played at home with the family. In tournament play, each player only gets 25 minutes to make all of their moves combined—and chess clocks are used to keep time. Each side usually makes 11 to 13 moves in a tournament game, which equals about two minutes per play. Exceed your allotted time and you’re penalized ten points for each minute over 25.

SNEAKY SCRABBLER

• One player who regularly entered Scrabble tournaments came under suspicion when he seemed to almost always produce a blank tile in every game. The blank tiles – two supplied in each game – are the most valuable because they can be used as any letter in the alphabet. While under close scrutiny in the next tournament, he was observed secretly sneaking pilfered blank tiles which he had hidden under his leg. He was promptly ejected and banned from any further competitive play.

The blank tile can stand in for any letter but has zero point value.

SCORING RECORDS

• The highest Scrabble score ever received on a single turn is 1,782, achieved by adding tiles to words already in place to form the word “oxyphenbutazone” (an anti-inflammatory drug). Player Benjamin Woo played it across the top of the board, hitting three Triple Word Score squares while making seven crosswords downward. He also scored an extra 50 points for using up all seven of his tiles in a single turn.

• Benjamin Woo’s 1,782 points eclipsed the previous record-holder. Karl Khoshnaw from Manchester, England held the record for the highest word score achieved in a competition, scoring 392 points with “caziques” which is the plural form of a word denoting a West Indian Chief.

• The highest score possible on the first round is 128 points with the word “muzjiks” meaning a Russian peasant

Artist Mary Evans depicts Russian peasants (muzjiks) bringing in the harvest in this creative work.

EMBIGGENING THE LEXICON

• In November of 2022, the 7th edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary added about 500 new words now allowed in play. Some of the news words included: adulting (behaving like an adult); embiggen (to make larger); fauxhawk (a fake Mohawk hairstyle); dumpster (now no longer trademarked); torrented and torrenting (downloading files); bae (slang for babe); covid and vax; along with yeehaw, vibing, welp, thingie, hangry, spork, swole, skeezy, pageview, and unmute. □