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The letter X

The X is often a short cut to a high score with very little effort. Perhaps surprisingly, it combines with every vowel to make a two-letter word: AX, EX, OX, XI a Greek letter and XU a Vietnamese coin. Slip an X next to a vowel, especially on a premium… Read More

Children’s word game: making adverbs

Word games are a fun and engaging way for kids to build their vocabulary and language skills. Classics like Hangman and Scrabble Junior encourage spelling and critical thinking, while games like Boggle and Word Search help kids recognize patterns and improve word recognition. For younger children, matching games with pictures… Read More

Serious hooking

Even reasonably experienced players tend to think that hooks – those letters you can add to the beginning or end of a word to form another word – mainly come into play with shorter words. But there are a surprising number of hooks even for eight-letter words, giving the possibility… Read More

Tile Synergies

Many times in the past I have been asked which letters I consider to be the most and least useful in Scrabble. My answer is normally “it depends” since Scrabble is a game of so much variety that each time you play will be unique. That being said, the Ss… Read More

(Im)proper nouns

A surprising number of common first names are valid words. If one of these is you, that’s at least one unusual word you are guaranteed to remember: BARRIE very good BARRY a blunder DANNY a hand… Read More

Downloadable Scrabble score sheet

As fans, we all know Scrabble is a fun and competitive word game where players earn points by forming words on a game board. Keeping track of scores and tiles used can make the game more enjoyable and fair. A Scrabble score sheet with tile tracking helps players monitor their… Read More

The letter W

The W comes up in four two-letter words, WE, WO, AW and OW. It’s not at all a bad letter for using in short words with J, X and Z: JAW JOW to ring a bell WAX WEX… Read More

The letter V

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,… Read More

The letter U

In the days before newer editions of the dictionary brought us all those U-less Q words, the U was prized as the only way you could get rid of the Q. Now that that no longer applies, it is not a particularly highly valued tile, being the least useful of… Read More