101 Ways to Win at Scrabble: Top tips for Scrabble success - Barry Grossman

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is rather hard to define – a sound to indicate deflating, diminishing or disappearing. A GRRL is a young woman who enjoys aggressively feminist rock music, just the type you are likely to meet at your local Scrabble club.

      Incidentally both BRRR and GRRL can have either two or three Rs – BRR, BRRR, GRRL and GRRRL, depending, presumably, on exactly how cold you are and exactly how aggressive the girl is.

      The C can be a very useful letter to have. It combines well with other high-scoring letters H and K to give you the chance of a high score for just a four- or five-letter word. If you can play something like CHUNK or FLICK, with the K on a triple-letter square and the whole thing on a double-word square, you score 48 for that alone.

      One drawback is the lack of those ever useful two-letter words: C only appears in one, the odd-looking CH, an obsolete South West of England pronoun meaning ‘I’.

      High-scoring three- and four-letter words with a C include:

      CAZ casual

      COZ old form of cousin

      COZE to chat

      COX

      COXA the hipbone

      BACH to live the life of a bachelor

      CHIB a knife; to stab with a knife

      CHIV same as CHIB

      CHAV (derogatory) working-class person who wears casual sports clothes

      ZACK an Australian five-cent coin

      EXEC an executive

      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.

      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.

      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.)

      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.

      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

      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

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