Interesting Facts

13th April Scrabble Day

If you ever needed proof that remembering lists of words doesn't mean you can speak the language, here it is. 48-year-old New Zealander, Nigel Richards, is the French-language world Scrabble champion, but he can't speak French. (He is 3 times world Scrabble champion, 5 times US champion, and has won 12 titles in the King’s Cup championship in Bangkok, but became world Champion of Francophone Scrabble, after memorizing all possible words in the official French scrabble dictionary, with two to 10 letters. Throw those vocabulary lists away.)

The final board of the 2013 British Scrabble championships contained words that don't appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. (But don't worry, there was no cheating going on, as they did appear in the official Scrabble dicationary. The 12 most obscure words on the final board were:- Aecia : A fruiting body of a rust fungus Coniines : Alkaloid that makes up the poisonous part of hemlock Vela : Plural of velum, a glass screen Zeds : Plural word for the letter Z Khis : Plural of khi, a letter in the Greek alphabet Fy: To digest Enew : (Hawk) Falconry term for driving a bird into the water Qat : variant spelling of khat, a plant whose leaves are chewed as a stimulant Litu : Plural of Litas, a former silver coin and monetary unit of Lithuania Atigi : Parka worn by the Inuits in northern Canada Bandura : Ukrainian lute Swarf : A swoon; grit abraded from an axle No...

Once a word gets into the Scrabble Dictionary, it never drops out. Source - Wikipedia   (The only exception is for words mistakenly included. For example "pH", which in the 1990s was taken out when someone realised it was an abbreviation. According to the publisher, Collins "Scrabble players don't like to unlearn words."   I'm not sure if you can "unlearn" something. BTW - I'm sure one of the words in this picture should be "bitten".)

Scrabble has announced that under new rules, proper nouns will be allowed in the game. (To date the rules have been clear, place names, people's names and the names of companies or brands don't count. But now a whole new world (literally) of opportunity has opened up. I can imagine the new arguments that will arise on spelling, and validity.   We need a proper nouns dictionary.)