Skip to main content

Scrabble – The Long and The Short Of It

By October 10, 2015August 19th, 2021Language

Did you know Scrabble is 73 years old? Created in 1948 by Alfred Butts, Scrabble’s original name was Lexico and didn’t use a board, being played with tiles only.
The frequency and number of each letter tile was decided upon by analysing the front page of The New York Times and it remains to this day, one of the world’s most popular board games.

Here are a few Scrabble facts for you.

  • 30,000 Scrabble Games are started each and every hour around the world.
  • Over 150 million games have been sold in 121 countries around the world.
  • 53 % of all homes in Great Britain have a Scrabble set.
  • Scrabble is currently produced in 29 different languages. The most recent being Welsh which was added in 2006.
  • There are over 260,000 legal words allowed under British Scrabble rules.
  • The highest number of points that can be scored on the first go (Br-Eng rules) is 128 – with ‘muzjiks’ (Russian peasants).
  • The highest score for one game is 1049 by Philip Appleby from Lymington in 1989.
  • Dr Karl Khoshnaw from Manchester holds the record for the highest word score achieved in a competition, scoring 392 points with ‘caziques’ – the plural for a West Indian Chief.
  • It’s not possible to play Scrabble in Japanese or Chinese, but they play in English with a rule book in their own language.
  • Scrabble is used all over the world as a method of teaching English.
  • The US Scrabble dictionary has banned all offensive words.
  • Somewhere in the world there are over a million missing Scrabble tiles.
  • In French Scrabble, there are five tiles worth 10 points – K, W, X, Y, and Z.
  • The World Record for the most number of games being played simultaneously by one player is held by Malaysian player Ganesh Asirvatham who played 25 games at once. These took place over two and a half hours and he won 21 of the games.
  • At the 1st World Championships in 1991 in London, there was a minor hiccup before play could get underway – there were no tiles to play with.
  • In 1985 Lt Cdr Waghorn and Lance Corporal Gill played Scrabble continuously for five days when trapped in a crevasse in Antarctica.
  • English Scrabble has 100 tiles, the most tiles are in Italian and Portugeses which both have 120 tiles.
  • In English speaking Scrabble if you draw seven tiles on the first move, there is a one in eight chance that they will make a seven-letter word.
  • Scrabble features in the best selling books: Lolita, the Handmaid’s Tale and Rosemary’s Baby.

Now anyone who has ever played Scrabble, especially online Scrabble knows, there are myriad strange and unusual two letter words that are played by Genius (or cheating) Scrabblers to the consternation of us poor saps who languish behind with our proper words that are usually worth a measly twelve points. And then of course there are the amazingly incomprehensible 7  letter words that leave you floundering and wondering just what your English teacher was up to when they were supposed to be teaching you the language of the country of your birth.
Below I’m going to list a few of the highest scoring words for each number of tiles available. Read this and you too can become a Scrabble Champion.

Highest Scoring Two Letter Words

AX 9 – EX 9
JO 9 – OX 9
XI 9 – XU 9
BY 7 – HM 7
MY 7

Highest Scoring Three Letter Words

JIZ 19 – ZEK 16
FEZ 15 – FIZ 15
PYX 15 – WIZ 15
BEZ 14 – BIZ 14
COZ 14 – CUZ 14
KEX 14 – ZAP 14
ZIP 14

Highest Scoring Four Letter Words

QUIZ 22 – JEEZ 20
FOZY 19 – HAZY 19
JAZz 19 – WHIZ 19
CHEZ 18 – COZY 18
JEUX 18 – JINX 18
JOKY 18 – MAZY 18
QOPH 18 – ZYME 18

Highest Scoring Five Letter Words

JAZzY 23 – JACKY 21 – JIFFY 21
JUNKY 21 – QUAKY 21 – ZAPPY 21
ZAXES 21 – ZINKY 21 – ZIPPY 21
FURZY 20 – HAFIZ 20 – QUACK 20
QUAFF 20 – QUICK 20 – QUIFF 20
WOOZY 20 – COZEY 19 – CRAZY 19
ENZYM 19 – FUZzY 19 – HAMZA 19
JAMMY 19 – JEMMY 19 – JERKY 19
JIMMY 19 – JIMPY 19 – JOKEY 19
JUMPY 19 – KUDZU 19 – KYLIX 19
QOPHS 19 – WHIZz 19 – ZILCH 19
ZINCY 19 – ZYMES 19

Highest Scoring Six Letter Words

MUZJIK 28 – QUEAZY 27
EXEQUY 25 – FROWZY 24
MUZHIK 24 – QUARTZ 24
QUEZAL 24 – WHEEZY 24
ZINCKY 24 – BLOWZY 23
HAMZAH 23 – SCHIZY 23
ZEBECK 23 – ZEPHYR 23

Highest Scoring Seven Letter Words

MUZJIKS 79 – BEZIQUE 77
CAZIQUE 77 – JUKEBOX 77
MEZQUIT 77 – KOLHOZY 76
SOVKHOZ 76 – ZINKIFY 76
ZOMBIFY 76 – ASPHYXY 75
JAZzILY 75 – JEZEBEL 75
MUZHIKS 75 – PACKWAX 75
QUETZAL 75 – QUEZALS 75
QUICKLY 75 – QUIZzED 75
SQUEEZE 75 – SQUIFFY 75
ZYMURGY 75

How about treating yourself to a rather sumptuous Scrabble board? Got a spare £30,000? It doesn’t matter, you can’t buy it anyway.
The most expensive Scrabble board ever was created for the Prague Mind Sports Festival which was used to host the World Scrabble Championship in 2012.

It comes complete with LEDs, RFID chips and software that transmits the game to the Internet in real time.

The board houses 225 RFID sensors underneath each square that detect the presence of tiles with corresponding RFID sensors. Throughout the game, the software scans the board every 974 milliseconds to transmit the game to a live-stream on the web.

If that’s a little on the ostentatious side for you perhaps this is a little more to your taste. Beautiful but playable.

Deluxe Scrabble Set US
Deluxe Scrabble Set UK

You can keep all your Candy Crush and Farmville apps, give me a game of Scrabble any day.

Now what can I do with these tiles  X-Z-Q-R-V-K-C ?

Leave your vote

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.