FWIW, I used to play online against one friend, and it became obvious after a while that he didn't actually know a lot of the words he used. Rat smelled.
Although, saying that, my wife regularly beats me, and English isn't even her first language.
I do use words I don't know -- I have a slightly larger vocabulary in terms of "I'm certain I've seen these letters in this order somewhere" than in terms of what I could actually use in a sentence. Just played 'sizar' -- I knew it was a word, but had to google after I played to find out what it meant (a type of scholarship student, roughly.)
Facebook Scrabble is a little different, though -- if you put something down that's not a legal play, it rejects it and you get to try again without your opponent having seen the failure. So it rewards taking a shot at half-remembered words.
One of the world champion scrabble players is a Thai who doesn't even know English. He plays strings of letters and has memorized the official dictionary.
I wonder how he got interested in scrabble.
he didn't actually know a lot of the words he used
I play Scrabble nearly constantly (start a game with me!), and I have whole books' worth of words that I only know from Scrabble (e.g., einkorn, qanat, etc.). Obscure words are helpful, but it's really more about working the bonus tiles and multiple words to maximize your points.
Although, saying that, my wife regularly beats me....
Safe space, ttaM. We're here for you. Don't blame yourself.
1: my wife regularly beats me, and English isn't even her first language.
-- "Strzm" is not a word!
-- Yes! It is! My mother has one!
Also, I really prefer the Lexulous and Wordscraper versions of the game, which make for more wide open, higher-scoring games.
I used to play Scrabble regularly with my grandmother. She didn't win - that's too mild a word. She annihilated. She was a Scrabble Jedi. Also, crosswords.
One guess what she spent the War doing.
Yeah, there are a couple of words like qi and qat that I only know from this last burst of Scrabble. (Hadn't played for years before I started on Facebook a month or two ago.)
it's really more about working the bonus tiles and multiple words to maximize your points.
Yeah, that's where the real skill comes in; those plays where you put down two letters and they make four short, common words, and it all adds up to thirtyfive points. I find long words more satisfying, but that doesn't get you the score.
9: So cool. Have I mentioned that my grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project? (We think, from the timing and location. He didn't know at the time what he was doing -- he was working as an adding machine.)
[H]e was working as an adding machine.
I feel like I should have something for this.
11: yeah, apparently Alan Turing was a lovely man and all the Wrens adored him but thought he was terribly shy.
He hated it. Lost his job working in a copper foundry, which he'd loved, in the Depression, and then found work in an insurance company doing arithmetic, which he really didn't enjoy. During the war, his department got lent by the insurance company to do arithmetic for secret government projects.
The secrecy around that project was pretty intense - the crew of the Enola Gay weren't even told what their payload was, only that it was a certain weight and needed to be dropped from a certain height. (Tibbetts knew, but he was the only one, and he kind of hinted to the others after takeoff.)
During the war, his department got lent by the insurance company to do arithmetic for secret government projects.
Maybe something Grandpa Simpson-y about the shortage of times tables, due to rationing? Hitler's Long Division?
And I'm not remembering the details well enough to know why he thought after the war that that was what he'd been working on. The family story is "Manhattan Project", but it could have been anything secret.
Interesting that the thread turned this direction on Pearl Harbor Day.
I bet you could beat me at Scrabble, LB. I'll add the FB widget. Because being crushed by my brother-in-law at Lexulous is getting tedious.
||
More than one way to spell "doughnut," one phonetic, one displaying the component words, and MY still manages to get it wrong.
|>
re: 2 and others
In the case of my friend he was just randomly adding letters or things that looked 'wordy' until the software allowed it as a legit word.
I, on the other hand, have a pretty big vocabulary,* but only play words I know, and am probably quite shit at the Scrabble-play aspect. FWIW, words like qi, qat and qanat are words I just know. I don't think I've ever tried to memorise words for Scrabble.
* although if I recall from some test website links that circulated, not as big as others here.
BR plays Words with Friends. I used to play, but I kept getting beat. So I took my little words and went home.
to be decent at Scrabs, you at least have to memorize the 2-letter words. FB Scrabs kindly shows them all to you, but it helps to memorize them.
LA LI LO KA KI QI ZA EX AX OX XU XI
etc.
also, rule #1: don't give you opponents opportunities to make triple word plays unless you need to in order to make a really great play yourself.
A maximum of five of those words are actual English words. Xu xi qi za li ka all look like Chinese loan words, but as expressed out of context they're just syllables and not words. Scrabble is a big fat cheater. Why not Pa?
I actually just tried to play 'Da', and was surprised to find it's not legal -- it seems much closer to being a real word than 'za' as a short form of 'pizza'.
Not "ka," Mandarin doesn't have that syllable.
Isn't that the Egyptian (um, 'ancient' Egyptian) word for the soul? I don't know if that's why Scrabble thinks it's a word, or if there's something else.
Checking Wiktionary, xi is a Greek letter, I think appropriate. Za, li, xu all way too obscure - musical note, Vietnamese coin, Chinese mile, all obsolete. Qi is used by New Agers, update of "chi." Ka is indeed that Egyptian thing; borderline.
Za is a musical note? Like an alternative to one of the do-re-mi syllables? I thought it was literally acceptable as short-form 'pizza': I'm sure (in that, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I'm sure) it wasn't a Scrabble word when I was a kid.
Pa and Da I would have thought should be acceptable; they're both words for "father". Da is also a broad-bladed Burmese knife (also written "dah").
I think Pa is acceptable. Ma, certainly.
There are a few kas in Mandarin, mostly used in translitertions (kafei = coffee) or as onomatapoeia, but one is a real word used as a verb. It's very rare even in Chinese, though. My Chinese software blinked out but later I'll try to show it.
I'm also surprisingly bad at Scrabble, considering I've got the vocab. Fortunately, I also don't enjoy it, so the situation works fine for me.
This is why Boggle is a much better game than Scrabble.
We're both competitive enough, and susceptible enough to thinking that there's got to be a bingo in any given rack of letters if you just stare at it for long enough, that Scrabble games kept getting longer and finally got flat-out intolerable. We added a chess clock. Thirty-minute Scrabble is so much better.
Everybody sends me Words with Friends requests because I yap about the Times crossword and I have to explain that Scrabble, despite its resemblance to crosswords, is totally anxiogenic.
Yeah, there are a couple of words like qi and qat that I only know from this last burst of Scrabble....those plays where you put down two letters and they make four short, common words
My great aunt vanquished us all with "ut" which is the first syllable of solfege in, I don't know, French?, but still in the dictionary, so it was valid.
Wait, what? There's Facebook Scrabble again?
Yep. If you need an easy opponent to get back into playing, I'm up for it.
Ka of coffee: 咖.
Ka verb I've never seen but which is in my dictionary: 卡.
39: Just when I thought I'd kicked the Scrabble habit! I might have to take you up on that.
I am someone else who sucks at scrabble despite knowing a million trillion words. I'm not sure why. I also can't get puns. I have a word blind spot of uncertain boundaries.
I haven't played Scrabble in a long time; I played a little when I was a kid, but I don't remember how good I was. I did recently come across this paper on using Scrabble to teach Gwich'in (an indigenous language of Alaska), which makes some interesting points about the game's usefulness in language teaching.
re: 42
I get puns. But I do find them incredibly irritating, most of the time, unless they are really very witty. Which, qua lowest form of wit, they almost never are.*
* no offence intended to those compelled by some eldritch force to make the fucking things.
(Note from my Scrabble life: since this post has gone up, I have lost two more games to Unfogged people, and am only barely going to beat the stranger I bingoed on -- fifty free points for the bingo have turned into scraping out a ten-point lead, and we both still have a couple of letters to play, so he could conceivably turn it around.)
42: My sister. Yeah, I have no sense of strategy and am married to playing cute rather than useful -- indeed at the expense of useful -- words.
(and I have now actually beaten the stranger. Yay! I am not the worst Scrabble player on Facebook. Just on Unfogged.)
am married to playing cute rather than useful -- indeed at the expense of useful -- words.
Wait, that's isn't what the game's all about?
I haven't thought about it in a while, but looking back, it seems like there must have been a couple of months in my second year of college when I did nothing but play Scrabble. I rarely won, as far as I can recall.
I never liked playing Scrabble as a kid. My brother would always try to pass of the back of a regular tile as one of the blanks.
||I am trying out my progressive lenses. They're not so hard to get used to really -- mostly because in the "reading bit" of the lens there's no correction at all. |>
Just on Unfogged.
I'd bet good money that this isn't true. I couldn't even unscramble "Lord Castock".
50: I'm sure reactionary lenses wouldn't be so easy.
With Moby's reading, 50 is actually pretty witty.
I used to play a lot of scrabble with a good scrabble player. The first time I won (after dozens of games) was when I scored over 200 on a single word (triple-triple bingo on a word with a Q) and still only won by 15.
I suspect I'm annoying to play scrabble with. I believe it's never too early in the game to play a three letter word that closes off all the available branches. And I second Smearcase's description of Words for Friends as anxiogenic. A potentially unlimited time to make my move, interrupted by other friends challenging me, just wears on me.
I'm about a year or two away from needing bifocals or the like. I'm practicing how to make light of it.
My brother would always try to pass of the back of a regular tile as one of the blanks.
My dad would always make up words, and when I would express doubt that they were real words, he'd tell me rather ominously that I could challenge them but would lose a turn if I was wrong. I never caught on because we didn't play that much.
In retrospect, it's clear to me that bilt is not an alternative past participle of build.
See, that doesn't mean it's not in the scrabble dictionary.
On a recent road trip, we added a twist to Travel Scrabble, the twist being you can put down a made-up word, provided you can convince a simple majority of the other passengers of its hilarity or other worthiness.
It was a riot. Or maybe we'd just been in a car too long.
We used to play Trivial Pursuit on long car trips when I was a kid. By the time I was 16 or so, I was good enough that dad and I were not allowed to be on the same team.
My last year of college, I overheard a first- or second-year student telling a somewhat embellished story about a Trivial Pursuit game I played in my first year of college to a group of disbelieving classmates. That was odd.
My dad would always make up words, and when I would express doubt that they were real words, he'd tell me rather ominously that I could challenge them but would lose a turn if I was wrong.
Proving Fran Lebowitz' maxim: Children make the most desirable opponents at Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.
My favorite of her maxims about children is "Children should never be allowed to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too much vermouth."
Ginger and Gabardine, have you tried Bananagrams? Everyone is working for the whole game and it can be played with a Scrabble set.
Oh yes. Gleefully.
Hey, Upetgi(9), are you going to the usual shindig over MLK weekend? We might be getting on for quorum for a meetup on the Thursday.
Yes, I will be there starting Wednesday (I'll also be in Boston the previous weekend as well). Though I'm running a workshop Thursday 8-9:30, which may make timing a bit tricky.
Wait, no, 7-8:30.
After the workshop, then? We haven't booked flights but will probably get in in the early evening, so slightly later is good.
65: Never heard of it. Is it called something else in Knifecrime Island?