Wednesday, August 13
Some facts about the game of Scrabble during the 25th National Scrabble Championships being played in Buffalo, New York. The winners will be crowned Wednesday.
— Architect Alfred Butts devised the game, first called Lexiko, then Criss Cross Words, during the Great Depression.
— There are 100 letter tiles in a Scrabble game, ranging in value from 1 point (A, E, I, O, U, L, N, S, T, R) and 10 points (Q, Z).
— Groups of six letters that combine with another letter for a valuable seven-letter word are called bingo stems. SATINE, SATIRE AND RETINA are considered the best bingo stems.
— "The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary," released Monday from Merriam-Webster, was the first update in a decade and added 5,000 words including bromance, selfie and two-letter words like po, da and gi.
— Playable Scrabble words must be found in a standard dictionary, can't require capitalization, can't have hyphens or apostrophes and can't be an abbreviation.
— Scrabble was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2004.
— Hasbro Inc. sells 2 million copies annually in the United States.
— The North American Scrabble Players Association counts 151 active sanctioned clubs in North America.
— The highest word score recorded in a sanctioned NASPA tournament was braziers, which earned T.A. Sanders 311 points in 1997 in Tyler, Texas.
— The association has a code of conduct that prohibits audible obscenities, visible obscenities, physical abuse, intimidation, threats, cheating and suspicious behavior.
Sources: National Toy Hall of Fame, North American Scrabble Players Association