My A to Z of Scrabble words
I popped up on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme today to talk about Scrabble. There’s a new version of the great game just out - it’s a bit easier to play, less competitive, more inclusive. That’s the pitch from Mattel - and I’m happy with that. I love words, I love language, I love Scrabble. With Susie Dent, I host a weekly podcast called SOMETHING RHYMES WITH PURPLE. Susie introduces me to new words every week.
The best way to remember a new word is to use it. And then use it again. There’s no excuse. New research from the department of neurobiology at Columbia University has established that new brain cells grow as quickly when you are in your seventies as when you are in your seventies. Remembering things does not have to get more difficult as you grow older. According to the scientists at Columbia, gradual mental decline ‘is not the inevitable process many of us think it is.’ The researchers made their discovery after counting the number of new cwlls growing in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that processes memories and emotions. They found that around 700 brain cells were created each day even in the oldest people they studied, and that there was no difference in the hippocampus in you and old brains.
So regardless of your age, try to learn a new word every day and test yourself at the end of the week. New to the Brandreth vocabulary this week have been these magnificent seven: niblings (‘siblings’ are your brothers and sisters; ‘niblings’ are your nephews and nieces); abecedarian (someone who is learning the alphabet); kickie-wickie (I went to a production of All’s Well That Ends Well this week and noticed the word for the first time: it’s one of Shakespeare’s playful synonyms for ‘a wife’); pingle (an old verb meaning ‘to eat with very little appetite’); blutter (‘to blurt out’); woopie (‘a well-off older person’; and CIO (an acronym for ‘Cry It Out’, a method of baby sleep training, as in ‘Leave them CIO’.)
I love Scrabble! I come from a family of word-lovers and board game enthusiasts. In 1936, my father (a lawyer) bought one of the first sets of Monopoly sold in Britain. He met my mother (a teacher) playing Monopoly. After the Second World War, when Scrabble was introduced to Britain my parents bought one of the first sets to be sold here. In the early 1950s, almost from the age I could walk and talk, I was playing Scrabble. Much of my life-long love of words I owe to this extraordinary game.
When I was thirteen I was sent to a boarding school called Bedales in Hampshire. The founder of the school, J H Badley (1863-1965), lived in the school grounds and on Wednesday afternoons I was sent to play a game of Scrabble with him. He was in his late nineties then and played a mean game. Invariably he won. I told him he was cheating because he used words that were obsolete. He claimed they had been current when he had first learned them. He was a remarkable man. In the 1890s, he knew Oscar Wilde, whose eldest son, Cyril, was a pupil at Bedales. In the 1960s he was playing Scrabble with me. At 100, he believed Scrabble kept his mind alive. It did. It does.
By the time I left university, at the beginning of the 1970s, I had become a Scrabble obsessive. I would go so far as to say I had become a Scrabble evangelist: I wanted to spread the word of the world’s most wonderful word game. That’s how I came to found the National Scrabble Championships in 1971. I was writing a book about prison reform at the time. I had visited Bristol Prison and seen some inmates playing Scrabble. I knew that The Queen played Scrabble. I thought, ‘This is game enjoyed by Her Majesty and those detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure: it’s a game for everyone. We need a national competition to find the best player in the land.’
From that first national championship, the Scrabble movement grew and grew: competitions proliferated, standards rose, sales soared. We had Scrabble on TV, Scrabble clothes (I had several Scrabble jumpers), Travel Scrabble, computer Scrabble . . . You name it, we found a Scrabble angle to it. Yes, there have been and are other enjoyable word games (Bananagrams is another of my favourites), but none can rival Scrabble.
The Association of British Scrabble Players (of which I am the proud president) was formed in 1987 as an organisation to oversee UK tournament Scrabble and its associated rating system. There are now one-day or weekend tournaments somewhere in the British Isles nearly every week, organised by local clubs and individuals with results rated by the ABSP. Check out www.absp.org.uk to find out more.
Champion Scrabble players have vast vocabularies. My friend Mark Nyman (a former World Champion at Scrabble as well as a former producer at Countdown) has an encyclopedic knowledge of the words that are allowable in Scrabble. Many of them are pretty obscure. Many of them are abbreviations or foreign words that have crept into the Scrabble dictionary because they are so useful to the game. I knew that qi is allowed in Scrabble as an alternative spelling of chi, meaning the ‘life force’ in Chinese philosophy and medicine; I knew that zo is an approved Scrabble word because it’s one way of spelling the word for a type of Himalayan cattle; but I have only just discovered from Mark Nyman that za is permissible, as a colloquial abbreviation for ‘pizza’.
With a little help from my friend, here is my A to Z of useful and unusual words to play at Scrabble:
aa
volcanic lava
azulejo
a Spanish porcelain tile
bambi
born again middle-aged biker
boobird
someone who boos
caz
short for ‘casual’
cineaste
film enthusiast
dweebish
quite stupid
divi
very stupid
ee
eye
elint
electronic intelligence
fetology
study of the foetus
fjeld
a high rocky Scandinavian plateau
gosht
an Indian meat dish
gymp
to limp
hili
a scar on a seed
huhu
a hairy New Zealand beetle
io
a moth
icekhana
a race on a frozen lake
jerepigo
a fortified wine
jube
a gallery in a church
kaal
a South African word for ‘naked’
koha
a Maori gift
luz
indestructible human bone
lunkhead
a stupid person
maxed
reached full extent
mips
million instructions per second
nox
nitrogen oxide
nonwords
yes ‘nonwords’ meaning ‘nonwords’ is allowed!
oi
a shout for attention
oreades
mountain nymphs
pht
a sound to express irritation
patootie
a backside
qin
a Chinese musical instrument
qwerty
a keyboard
ritornel
an orchestral passage
rodney
a small Canadian fishing boat
slyboots
a sly one
sweetman
a Caribbean man kept by a woman
tiglic
a syrup liquid
tiz
a state of confusion
ubique
everywhere
ulva
seaweed
veep
vice-president
waugh
to bark
whump
to make a dull thud
xerafin
an Indian coin
xerotic
abnormal dryness of bodily tissues
(some words just don’t live up to their promise)
yahooism
crude behavior
yuzu
a citrus fruit
zit
a pimple
zzzs
sleeps
(they allow ‘zzz’ for a sleep in Scrabble, so they have to allow ‘zzzs’. I know, I know, but it’s only a game)