fabuscrabulous

That old classic Scrabble got a new lease of life this year, its 60th of existence, when two Calcutta brothers, created an online version of the game known as Scrabulous, with hundreds of thousands of players on Facebook. Cue big meanie game companies Mattel and Hasbro trying to spoil everyone’s fun, instead of getting with the plot and realizing this could earn them even more cash than before. But if an American architect hadn’t lost his job in the Great Depression, none of us would have any tiles to draw.

‘Brailling’, or feeling the tiles in the bag to get the one you want, fighting over approved dictionaries, and the exalted triple word squares. Here’s how it all started. No word yet, however, on when the chocolate version is coming out.

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, Saturday June 28, 2008

The highest score that it is theoretically possible to achieve in a single turn in Scrabble is for the word “oxyphenbutazone”. Even at the top levels of tournament Scrabble, this has never actually happened: it would require the game to have unfolded in exactly the right way up to that point, leaving exactly the right open spaces, and the right combination of letters in the bag. But if it did, it would span three triple-word scores, creating seven other new words on the board, for a total of at least 1,778, depending on which official word list you used. The closest anyone has come in real life was a now deceased Kurdish player, Dr Karl Khoshnaw, who got 392 points for “caziques” at a contest in Manchester in 1982. (Oxyphenbutazone, in case you’re wondering, is a chemical compound used to treat arthritis; caziques were ancient Peruvian and Mexican princes. But if you had a Scrabble champion’s mind-set, you wouldn’t waste brain-space on what words mean: that’s not the point.)