Scrabble has always allowed American spellings – more than ever since the North American word list was incorporated into the one used by the rest of the world. So have no fear about playing COLOR or TRAVELED (as against the British TRAVELLED). Americans are also keen on prefixes like ANTI-, giving words like ANTICOLD, ANTIMAN and ANTIRIOT, and CO-, whence we get COWRITE, CODRIVE and COMANAGE.
A favourite (or should that be favorite?) US suffix is -LIKE, leading to ANTLIKE, ICELIKE, CRABLIKE and MOATLIKE. There is even an anagram, APELIKE and PEALIKE. And don’t worry about hyphens in these words – Americans rarely use them, so they are available to us even if they do look a bit odd to the British eye.
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.
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