13th April: Scrabble Day

Today is Scrabble Day. 10 things you didn't know about Scrabble.

1. The game was invented by Alfred Butts, who originally called it "Lexico", then "Criss-Cross Words". He never did come up with the name "Scrabble" - that was down to his business partner, James Brunot. Butts worked out the frequency of letters by analysing the front page of the New York Times. He used a penknife to cut his first set of wooden Scrabble tiles. The first games were played without a board, just using the tiles.
2. British Scrabble rules allow over 260,000 legal words including 124 permissible two-letter words. The only letter which cannot be used in a permissible two letter word is V.
3. The list of permissible words is continually evolving. Geocache, chillax, beatbox, frenemy, hashtag, joypad, mojito, selfie, soju, texter, vodcast, vlog, and yuzu have been added recently, along with some more very useful two letter words, gi, po, te, and da. "Da" had been removed from the list, which had resulted in the official who made that decision receiving death threats from keen players for years.
4. The best possible score for a first go is 128, with the word 'muzjiks', meaning Russian peasants. The best word ever played in a competition was 'caziques' - the plural for a West Indian Chief, which earned Dr Karl Khoshnaw from Manchester 392 points. Theoretically, a player could get extremely lucky with their tile selections and other players obligingly placing letters in the right places and be able to play OXYPHENBUTAZONE across the top of the board using three triple word scores. This would net them 1782 points.
5. There are around 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world, but there isn't one in the town of Scrabble in Berkeley County, West Virginia, USA.
6. There are 100 tiles in an English language Scrabble set. Other languages have different numbers of tiles and distribution of letters. For example, the largest number is 120, in Italian and Portugese; and Malaysian Scrabble sets have 19 A's. Some, such as Spanish, Catalan and Dutch have letters specific to those languages. Scrabble is produced in 29 different languages. The most recent language to be added was Welsh in 2006.
7. It is not possible to play Scrabble in Chinese or Japanese. In China and Japan they play in English but the rule book is in their own language.
8. If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were placed end to end they would reach the equivalent of eight times around the Earth. There are over a million which have gone missing over the years.
9. Got no consonants? You might be able to play 'euouae' (a Gregorian cadence). No vowels? try crwth(s) (an old Welsh stringed instrument).
10. The world's largest game of Scrabble took place in Wembley Stadium to mark the game's 50th anniversary in 1998. Each tile measured 6ft square and took two strong men to lift.