Scrabble addicts

Next Tuesday, Scrabble will be the subject of a masterclass at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. John Walsh looks at the word game that won a celebrity following

What is it that Robbie Williams can be found doing at half past midnight on a Saturday, after singing in front of 100,000 people? What does Kylie Minogue desperately want to be "The Face of..."? What has become the subject of two Hollywood movies and a documentary? What is it that both Nigella Lawson and her husband, Charles Saatchi, enjoy (and so, allegedly, do Christina Aguilera, Sting, Avril Lavigne and Alison Steadman)? There's only one activity that links all these people and events, one subject that attracts such an eclectic fan club, and it's not sex, drugs or rock'n'roll. It's Scrabble.

What is it that Robbie Williams can be found doing at half past midnight on a Saturday, after singing in front of 100,000 people? What does Kylie Minogue desperately want to be "The Face of..."? What has become the subject of two Hollywood movies and a documentary? What is it that both Nigella Lawson and her husband, Charles Saatchi, enjoy (and so, allegedly, do Christina Aguilera, Sting, Avril Lavigne and Alison Steadman)? There's only one activity that links all these people and events, one subject that attracts such an eclectic fan club, and it's not sex, drugs or rock'n'roll. It's Scrabble.

It may be 73 years old, but the venerable word game never dies or goes out of fashion. While other board games flourish and wither (whatever became of Trivial Pursuit?), Scrabble forges ahead, selling two and a half million sets worldwide every year. The secret of its success is threefold. First, it's a game of skill (like chess) that depends on the luck of the tiles you get (like cards). Second, it deploys a commodity common to every human being, namely words. Third, anyone can play it - children, teenage delinquents, the middle-aged, princes, drunkards, fascists, hospital patients, dimwits. Dimwits are especially drawn to it because, for unfathomable reasons, they tend to outsmart their intellectual betters. Scrabble history is filled with professors of Oxbridge colleges who know the meaning of every word in Shakespeare and the Shorter OED being soundly beaten by epsilon-minus semi-morons who know how to lay down the word SEX, so that S goes on the end of a long word on the board, and X lands on the triple word square...

Scrabble was invented in 1931 in New York by Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect down on his luck. He came up with the 15-squares-by-15plywood board, the vital double and treble-value squares, the 100 (hand-painted) tiles - he computed the individual "points" value of the letters by counting the number of times each appeared on the front page of The New York Times. At first he called the game Lexico, an off-putting title pitched somewhere between a brand of gasoline and a laxative. Later it was called Criss-Cross Words, but only 200 sets were sold. Only when it was taken over by Philippe Brunot, a more proactive entrepreneur, who patented it in 1948, did it take off and start to sell in thousands. Five years later, JW Spear & Sons introduced it to Britain; elsewhere, the Mattel corporation owns the world rights, except the US rights which are in the hands of Hasbro.

Over the years it has sold more than 100 million games in 121 countries and 29 different languages. Foreign-language boards naturally deal in different values for letters - in Malaysian Scrabble, for instance, there are 19 As. Presumably in Basque Scrabble, Xs and Zs turn up all over the place. In Singapore, people playing Scrabble in public are banned by law from constructing obscene words.

Many people have spotted Scrabble's potential as a tool of communication. The cool, interlocking grid of words is a dramatic message board - as the staff in Maghaberry jail, Co Antrim, discovered in spring this year when they found, in the recreation room, the words "NO MORE STRIP SEARCHING TIME TO BEAT A SCREW TO DEATH" spelt out in the familiar cream tiles and black lettering. Less chillingly, its potential for romance hasn't been ignored. Miramax Studios commissioned a movie called Your Word Against Mine after reading a single article in Sports Illustrated about a couple who fell in love at the World Scrabble Championship. And three years ago, the Hollywood director Curtis Hansen, after his triumphs with LA Confidential and The Perfect Storm, bought the rights to Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis.

This was the book that revealed the world of the Scrabble nerd in all his seedy glory - a world of dead-eyed loners straight out of an early Tom Waits song, friendless, loveless, unshaven and unemployable, their lives devoted to learning thousands of words by heart. First, the 121 two-letter words that are deemed acceptable by the Chambers Dictionary, then all the three-letter ones, the four-letters, the five... Their ultimate aim is to memorise all 140,000 words in the official Scrabble Dictionary.

Fatsis goes out of his way to defend his peer group. "They are glamorous in their own way," he told me. "They may not be cool in the conventional sense; they're not dressed all in black and smoking Camels. But they're compelling personalities with great stories to tell. Yes, the guys at the top tend to be one-dimensional. But is that really any different from Michael Jordan or David Beckham or some track star? Maybe in order to be successful at any pursuit at international level you have to be an obsessed misfit who's willing to devote eight hours a day to something."

Maybe. What must drive them mad is not just the memorising, but the fact that they rarely know or care what any of the words mean. All they deal in are the possible combinations of letters, and the constant, chronic anagram-ising of words. Scrabble freaks can spot, in an instant, that CARTHORSE is an anagram of ORCHESTRA, that THEIRSELVES turns nicely into SHIRTSLEEVE and that PRESBYTERIANS rearranges itself into BRITNEY SPEARS (not that that will help you on the Scrabble board, of course).

The rules were laid down 70-odd years ago and rarely change, except to allow in, like the most grudging of bouncers, the odd ex-brand name or ex-foreign usage that has become accepted by the dictionary. A number of mobile phone texters last year lobbied the Association of British Scrabble Players, demanding that examples of "text-speak" should be allowed as legitimate words: things like AKA (meaning "also known as"), BTW ("by the way"), "luv" and TMRW (work it out). They were turned down flat by Allan Simmons of the players' association, who said: "I want to see only words on the Scrabble board. In my view, the abbreviated letter sequences used in text language are just not words and certainly don't enrich one's vocabulary. Allowing them would cause outcry among club and tournament players."

The stern Mr Simmons, a former number one at the British Matchplay Championships, will appear before a packed audience at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on Tuesday night. He'll be talking to two other experts - Mark Nyman, the only UK player to have won the World Scrabble Championship (in New York in 1993), and Barry Grossman, author of Scrabble for Beginners. They won't, sadly, be playing competitively onstage, but will offer a masterclass in the lexical arcana of the game.

"Mark Nyman represents an extreme version of the focus you need to be a good Scrabble player," said Mr Simmons. "The hours, days and weeks you spend just learning the words. Words are the ammunition in this game; the more you know, the less it matters that you may be deficient in some other respects."

He did, however, offer solace to the not-quite-obsessive. "You haven't got to learn all the words in the book. You learn all the two-letter ones, and the three-letter words that can be derived from them. Then you learn the vowel-heavy words - that is, the four- and five-letter words with only one consonant. Then the words you can make with J, Q, X and Z, the 'power tiles'. The average person has a vocabulary of 30,000 words; but you only need to know about 2,000 'Scrabble words' to be an above-average player."

Every player has his favourite memory of inspired moments, when all the letters suddenly came together and the score hit three figures. For Fatsis, it was the time he watched another player building - across the three vertical-column letters A, B and G, the word AUBERGINE ("Everyone was slack-jawed, not just with amazement that he'd pulled it off, but by how beautiful it looked across the board"). For Mr Simmons, it was at the end of a game when "time was running short [championship Scrabble uses clocks, like chess] and I had the letters R, L, I, X and E. I also had a blank but couldn't play it because it carried no score points. With 30 seconds left, I discovered an 'I' and built the word ELIXIR around it. I was so delighted to have done it with, you know, seconds to spare ..."

Allan Simmons is very keen that the popularity of Scrabble should be acknowledged by sponsorship and media coverage. "It would make a very suitable television game show, just like snooker," he said. "The board fits the screen perfectly. It would be very easy to watch. You could have a voiceover of experts predicting the plays, the word combinations and possible scores. It could be very exciting. What it really needs is a sponsor."

The British Association of Scrabble Players holds its championships every year (this year's national final will be played on 21 November). When it comes to the world championships, a lot of low grumbling noises can be heard in Scrabble circles, because of the reluctance of the game's owners, Mattel and Hasbro, to become properly committed sponsors of the biannual event. "I'm chairman of a new group," said Mr Simmons, "called the World English Language Scrabble Players Association. No venue has been announced by Hasbro for the World Championships next year, so our organisation is trying to get Scrabble players to band together as a global force and organise the world championships themselves, if the owners of Scrabble won't do anything about it."

Such passion. Such attitude. Such competition. And you thought it was just a matter of putting an A and a B in front of SOLVE, making ABSOLVE and claiming your 13 points? Think again.

RAISE YOUR GAME

Two-letter words

There are 120 two-letter words in the English language - 27 are everyday words ("it", "in", "of" and so on); 93 others are interjections, contracted forms, tonic sol-fa and letter sounds such as AD, AH, AR, AW, BI, ED, EF, EH, EL, EM, EN, ER, ES, EX, FA, HA, HM, HO, LA, LO, MA, MI, MM, MO, OH, OO, OP, OW, PA, PO, RE, SH, ST, TA, TI, UG, UH, UM, UN, UR, and YO.

Then there are mathematical or religious symbols, or words, such as AA, AB, AE, AG, AI, AL, AX, AY, BA, BO, CH, DA, DE, DI, EA, EE, ET FY, GI, GU, ID, IO, JO, KA, KO, KY, LI, MU, NA, NE, NU, NY, OB, OD, OE, OI, OM, OS, OU, OY, PE, PH, PI, QI, SI, TE, UT, WO, XI, XU, YA, YU, and ZO.

All are listed in the Chambers Dictionary and are perfectly acceptable plays in Scrabble. "EM" and "EN" are also listed as print measurements, if you want to impress your friends.

The 'Q' question

Drawing a "q" without a "u" is not debilitating. QAT, QAID, QOPH, FAQIR, QANAT, TRANQ, QINDAR, QINTAR, QWERTY, SHEQEL, QINDARKA, SHEQALIM, INQILAB, MBAQANGA, QABALAH, QADI, QAIMAQAM, QALAMDAN, QASIDA, QI, QIBLA, QIGONG, QIS, QWERTIES, QWERTYS, TALAQ, TRANQ, TSADDIQIM, TSADDIQ, TZADDIQIM, TZADDIQ, WAQF, and YAQONA are all playable.

Scores

The highest achieved Scrabble score, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is 1,049 points. Highest-scoring seven-letter word is QUARTZY, played across a triple word square with the "Z" on a double-letter square for 164 points. HypotheticallyOXYPHENBUTAZONE (1,778) and BENZOXYCAMPHORS (1,962) would yield the highest possible scores.

Probability

The most likely word to appear on a scrabble rack is ETAERIO - a "cluster" fruit such as a raspberry.

Scandal

In August, Trey Wright played LEZ for 32 points in the US Scrabble contest final. He won, despite being forced to retract for fear of causing offence.