After two and a half years, my high-school German class reached a milestone when our teacher put away the textbook and got out the board games. We were so proud to have learned enough of a language that we could actually do something with it.
Monopoly wasn’t a language game per se, but playing it in German taught us important words like Los!, Miete and Hypothek. We also learned some geography from the squares on the board.
More challenging — to my classmates — was Scrabble, in which players form words and connect them to words formed by their opponents. As I was already a Scrabble wizard, we agreed that I would play with the board facing away from me and that my score would have to beat that of all three other players combined.
I won, but still found it challenging because the German letters had different values than the English letters. In English, any word using the letter J, Q, X or Z is an easy path to victory, particularly if you can put it in a good spot. K is also very useful. In German, though, J, K and Z are common; it’s Y you have to look out for, and Q is almost impossible to play.
When he created Scrabble 75 years ago, Alfred Mosher Butts based the letter values for English on the relative infrequency of those letters in the language. That’s why, in English, the most frequent letters — E, T, A, O, I, N, S, R, L and U — each get you only one point. In theory.
Butts’s method was to count how often the letters appeared on the front page of The New York Times. In the words of John Chew, co-president of the North American Scrabble Players’ Association, this created “a selection bias in favor of printed newspaper English which many people have suggested ought to be rectified.”
One of those advocating reform is software author Joshua Lewis, who points out that “the dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed. … Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X.”
By that, he means The Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary. It lists all the words that are valid for play. However — like the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary it’s based on — it includes thousands of obscure terms, outdated expressions and questionable loanwords.
Winning a game against a hardcore opponent — at a tournament, for example, or in Japan, where it’s a club sport — requires knowing as many obscure two- and three-letter words as possible, even if they’re not really English words at all. Typical examples include “ai”, a word for a three-toed sloth that lives only in Brazil, and “xu”, a Vietnamese penny that went out of use decades ago.
One of the fun aspects of Scrabble, though, is that players are allowed to challenge each other’s words. If the word is not in the dictionary, the person challenged loses a turn; if it is, the person challenging it loses a turn. One of my more interesting opponents made a real sport of this by inventing words that she claimed stood for Anasazi artifacts and rare vegetation. (I challenged them and won.)
But back to Joshua Lewis. He says that in English, X and Z are now much easier to play than they were in 1938, and that Q is more difficult than originally supposed.
Mattel, the company that makes the game in Europe, says it’s not willing to change the letter values to match Lewis’s findings. “It is not a game where fairness is paramount. It is a game of luck, and changing the tile values wouldn’t achieve anything,” said Scrabble’s representative in Britain.
Not fair? A game of luck? I strongly disagree. It’s about skill, and about language — and about learning a language, even if it’s your own.
Language note: The word “scrabble” has various meanings, mainly as a variation of “scribble” (in US English) or “scramble”. A further meaning is “to struggle by scraping or scratching”. An association of mine is with the word “hardscrabble”, which refers to a barren place. I think of this whenever I have a worthless hand.
Further reading
Read about how spelling is an official sport in America:
Time for a real sporting competition
