Some players use mnemonics, little mental shortcuts, to remember words. You can remember the spelling of EUOI by thinking of:
Excessive Units Of Intoxication
In a similar way, JIAO, a Chinese unit of currency, can become:
John Is Always Out
And CIAO, the Italian greeting – yes, that’s sufficiently anglicised to be a valid word too – has the vowels in the same order, so now you can spell that too.
If I tell you now that there is a word CEZVE (a small coffee-pot), and in a couple of months you have a Z, a C, a V and one or two Es on your rack, you might think, “What was that word? CEVZE? ZEVCE?”, and then either give up or get it wrong. But if I say, “Who says VE Day was in 1945?”, you’ve got it automatically.
I was quite taken with the word DHIKR and played about for a while to come up with a mnemonic to remember how to spell it. I toyed with Donald’s Hair Is Kinda Ridiculous, or Doctor Hammers In Knee Replacement, before I realized – the letters are in alphabetical order. Duh!
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.
