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CHAV (derogatory) working-class person who wears casual sports clothes
ZACK an Australian five-cent coin
EXEC an executive
15 Bonuses with a C (#ulink_1a358554-aefc-5fa3-9aea-2cb89de9ddbc)
Another drawback of the C is that it is not a hugely productive source of prefixes and suffixes, with CON-, -IC, -ANCE and –ENCE being about the best.
Words which combine a C with those common one-point tiles AEIOU and LNRST include CERTAIN, CISTERN, CINEAST (a film enthusiast), CANISTER and CLARINET.
Our American friends are fond of putting CO- before a word to signify something done in partnership: COEDITOR, COWRITE, CODRIVE and so on, along with all their derivatives like COWRITER, CODRIVER and CODRIVEN. These are all valid words. Don’t concern yourself with hyphens. The Yanks rarely bother with them and if they allow the word, so do we.
Definitions of CO- words are usually quite self-explanatory. COWRITE is not a religious ceremony involving cows, a CODRIVER is not a river full of cod, and a COINMATE is not a friend who helps you count your money.
16 Starting on the Sevens (#ulink_cee3afdc-91f1-5e0e-9ea8-bb54196e4170)
Some top-drawer Scrabble players know all the two-, three- and four-letter words. But nobody knows all the sevens. Well, maybe a tiny handful of dedicated word-study fanatics with photographic memories and lots of spare time, and even they must get the odd twinge of doubt over the correct spelling of HRYVNYA.
At the same time, seven-letter words are crucial to scoring big in Scrabble because if you can play one then you get that most wonderful of things, a fifty-point bonus. In the early days of serious Scrabble, players obsessed about learning as many sevens as they could because of this. It probably wasn’t the best approach to take and must have led to a lot of frustration as they waited, endlessly, to play ZYZZYVA (an American weevil). The secret is to confine yourself to the most useful ones, e.g. the sevens that are most likely to come up in play. These are those that consist solely of the one-point tiles LNRST and AEIOU – the commonest letters in the Scrabble bag.
17 Seventh Heaven (#ulink_c7a8e4f3-a254-5cc7-b009-71f341673381)
Here are some of the high-probability seven-letter words to remember as you search for a bonus-score:
NATURES
NEROLIS oil used in making perfume
NEUTRAL
OILNUTS
RETAINS
RITUALS
SALUTER
TAILORS
TRISULA trident symbol of Hindu god
Nearly all of these have at least one anagram (one has ten – can you guess which?). If you can get into the habit of being able to look at your rack and say, “Ah yes, AILRSTU, that makes RITUALS”, you will soon automatically also see the anagram, TRISULA, and you can then play whichever one fits on the board, scores more, or is otherwise the better move.
(The mighty ten-anagrammer is RETAINS, making eleven anagrams including RETAINS itself.)
18 Sizing Up the Eights (#ulink_58f0e197-6732-52f0-8090-c56b827ae6cf)
In the exact same way as it makes sense to concentrate on the sevens, which contain the commonest letters (AEIOU and LNRST), the eight-letter words with those same common letters are the ones that will pay the biggest dividends. Here are a few likely suspects:
LATRINES
LUNARIST one who believes the moon influences weather
NEUTRALS
NOTARIES
ORIENTAL
RETINOLS plural of retinol, a name for vitamin A
TENURIAL pertaining to a tenure
TONSILAR pertaining to a tonsil
TURNSOLE a plant with flowers said to turn towards the sun
Again, many of these have anagrams, and it’s a good idea to learn a few as it is often harder to place an eight-letter word on the board. For instance, ORIENTAL is an anagram of RELATION, but the third anagram TAILERON may be the only one that fits.
19 Fantastic Fours (#ulink_735ec305-b23a-5c03-9e31-8f7447c3791e)
Here are some fantastic fours to help you get rid of awkward consonants:
JIAO Chinese unit of currency
JEUX plural of JEU, a game
EAUX plural of EUA, a river
QUAI same as QUAY
QUEP expression of derision
QUOP to throb
QAID Arabic chief
QADI a Muslim judge
FIQH Islamic jurisprudence
WAQF Islamic charity
DZHO another spelling of ZO, our old friend the yak-cow cross
ZOOT as in zoot suit, a once fashionable man’s suit
VIVA to give a candidate an oral exam
VIVE long live
VIVO with vigour
VEXT same as VEXED
VIZY to look
WILI a spirit
CWMS plural of CWM, a Welsh valley
TSKS from TSK, to tut in irritation
20 Evaluate Your Rack (#ulink_9a27a990-81b8-541c-974a-d594ae5c3aba)
Good players can look at their rack at any given stage of the game and know what sort of move they should be trying to make. Most racks will fall into one of five categories; here’s what you should look to do for each type:
Too many vowels: Use one of the multi-vowel words or change.
Too many consonants: Use a multi-consonant word or change. There are lots of common five- and six-letter words which can help get rid of excess consonants: PRINT, TRUCK, CLAMP, FRONT, THRONG, etc.
Bonus-friendly: Good balance of vowels and consonants, mainly one-point tiles, no double letters (or one at most). Have a good look for a bonus word, either a seven or a playable eight. If you can’t find it, play off the least appealing letters to increase your chance of a bonus on the next turn. Don’t neglect to still get a reasonable score now if you possibly can.
High value: Two or more of the higher-scoring tiles (those scoring three or more) but with vowels to help you use them. Play the high-value tiles, making maximum use of premium squares. It helps if the high-value tiles go nicely with each other, like CHK, rather than being incompatible like GVW.
Just rubbish: Racks full of incompatible letters like IJUY, or low-value tiles that don’t look like they’re close to a bonus, like GLLNOOU. With this sort of rack you probably just have to play off as many as you can for as much as you can, or change.
21 The D (#ulink_6d304260-9642-52a0-a7da-85c8a82b259d)
The D is one of only two letters worth two points (the other is the G), and this indicates its status as not being quite as common as the one-point consonants.
Its main use for bonuses is for forming past tenses and past participles of verbs – PLANTED, SPRAYED, INFLATED, REMAINED and thousands more. There are also lots of words with DE- at the beginning – DELOUSE, DEVELOP, DENATURE and so on. This does show the main weakness of the D which is that it needs an E to be most effective, although DIS- can also be a handy prefix, with words like DISPLAY, DISCORD, DISTRACT.
22 Short Ds (#ulink_7f8b9f94-2ef9-52c8-a751-3ca488e7227c)
There are eight two-letter words with D:
AD an advertisement
ED an editor
ID term used in psychoanalysis; also a type of fish
OD hypothetical force or form of energy
DA a Burmese knife
DE of (found in place-names such as Ashby de la Zouch)
DI plural of deus, a god
DO
And here are some useful three- and four-letter words with D:
DSO, DZO, DZHO all alternative spellings of ZO
DOJO a room where martial arts are practised
JEDI a person who embraces the philosophy of the Jedi from the Star Wars films
DEXY a dextroamphetamine pill
DIXI interjection meaning “I have spoken”
DIXY a large pot for water
DOXY a religious opinion or doctrine
Not forgetting the ultra-useful QAID (a chief) and
QADI (a Muslim judge).
23 Making the Change (#ulink_e8aa7fce-b5dd-5359-a332-f91044ed709d)
Nobody likes having to change letters, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. In most circumstances, if you can score at least twenty, maybe even fifteen, I would say make the move. The rack might just sort itself out – even IJUY might transform into JUICILY or JURYING. If not, you can always change next time.
If you do change, make sure you change enough to make a real difference. If you have AIIOUDP, don’t just change the U and one I. Especially if there are blanks or other good letters to come, change four vowels or all five, and maybe one or both consonants as well. Take a moment to count the number of consonants and vowels played, which will give you an idea of which you are likely to pick more of (there are 56 consonants and 42 vowels in the bag at the start of the game).
Above all, don’t go fishing. You might be holding COMPARV, leading you to think that if you change the V and pick an E, you will have COMPARE. Well, so you will. If you pick the E. Which you probably won’t. So score what you can with your high-scoring tiles and see what the bag brings you.
24 Before We Leave Those Vowels … (#ulink_1dfaa9cd-bf7c-5c30-ae4d-f5e7dc6964e7)
We’ve seen two-vowel two-letter words (like AE and OU), three-vowel threes (like AIA and EAU), three-vowel fours (like JIAO and QUAI), and that amazing four-vowel cry of Bacchic frenzy, EUOI. But we can raise the stakes higher still by giving you … an all-vowel six-letter word. Yes, if you’ve really got a rackful of vowels that you need to get rid of, the daddy of them all is – EUOUAE.
Wow! What? Yes! EUOUAE. It’s a word formerly used in Church music, taken from the vowels in the words Seculorum Amen. In those days, U and V were more or less interchangeable, so it was referred to as the more pronounceable EVOVAE (also a valid word). But EUOUAE held on as well, and it even has a plural EUOUAES.
EUOI and EUOUAE may help get you out of trouble, but they are unlikely to score you much and unless they enable you to play just what you want to get rid of, you may be better changing. EUOUAE does let you dump those two unpleasant Us (the least useful vowel) but you are also losing two nice Es, not something you want to do without careful consideration.
25 Keep Scoring (#ulink_8798ecbd-2d40-546f-9897-9e262a9f6f8b)
It can be useful to hold on to the one-point tiles AEIOU and LNRST as these are the commonest letters and therefore the ones which are most likely to form a bonus word.
But you must resist just blindly putting any of those letters to one side of your rack and holding on to them grimly, come what may. As you get more of them, you are playing with fewer and fewer tiles until you get your bonus, and almost certainly getting low scores.
So try to keep scoring at the same time as knocking your rack into shape. With, say, an A, an I, an N or an R, don’t be afraid to play it to help you get a decent score, especially if there are a few of them still to come. Even the better letters like E or S can be worth playing to keep your score moving along. Only the blank should definitely be kept for a bonus or other high-scoring move.
