Once you get to the stage of knowing all the two-letter words, you will develop a strong dislike for the V, as it is the only letter that does not figure in any of them. But as long as the rest of your rack isn’t all Is, Us and Ws, the V can be a decent scoring letter.
If you have the rack AEILORS, which, despite that bonus-friendly line-up of one-point tiles, doesn’t make a seven-letter word, the best letter you can have on the board to play through to make an eight is the V. It would give you a choice of four eight-letter words:
OVERSAIL to project beyond
VALORISE to fix the price of a commodity
VARIOLES the round masses that make up a variolite rock
VOLARIES plural of VOLARY, a large bird enclosure
That OVERSAIL gives a clue to what is often the best way to use a V – the prefix OVER-. It gives lots of good words like OVERLIE, OVERNET (cover with a net) and OVERSELL.
There is a three-letter word with two Vs – VAV, a Hebrew letter, and there are also the handy VIVA (oral exam), VIVE (… la France) and VIVO (musical term for lively) if you are determined to get rid of two at a time.
By Barry Grossman
Barry is a leading UK Scrabble player and winner of several tournaments. He is the author of Scrabble for Beginners (Chambers), Need to Know Scrabble, Scrabble – Play to Win and The Little Book of Scrabble Trickster. He has also contributed to numerous other books on the subject of words and word-games, has been a series champion of Channel 4’s Countdown, and has written four comedy series for BBC Radio 4. He lives in Hertford.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
