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Young World
What’s the good word?
PANKAJA SRINIVASAN
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Get yourself a scrabble board game, and your life will never be the same again.
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Photo: K. Murali Kumar
Popular board game: Mastering the language.
Xebec is a small three-masted sailing ship…, Yod is the tenth and the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet and zorilla is a skunk-like carnivorous mammal inhabiting the arid regions of southern Africa. I bet you didn’t know that!
I learnt these words while playing the world’s most entertaining word game, Scrabble. If you haven’t already, get a scrabble board right away and your summer vacation will never be the same again.
Very simply put Scrabble is a word building game where each player draws out seven lettered tiles, and uses them to come up with words. Each letter carries points. And, some of the squares on the board also carry scores. So you have the double-letter score, triple-letter score, double-word score and the coveted triple-word score. If you manage to make a word with all the seven letters you have in your possession, then you get bonus points. Look at a scrabble board you will know what I mean.
History of Scrabble
An out-of-work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts had the brainwave to invent the Scrabble. Of course it was not called so then. He called it Lexico. This was in 1931. Over the years, Butts fine-tuned the board game, and some of the playing rules changed. Lexico became New Anagrams, Alph, Criss-Cross then Criss-Crosswords, and finally in 1948 it became Scrabble. However, some of the features of the game are the very same as they started out all those years ago.
So popular did the game become that in 1991, there was the first world championship in London. In fact, in India too there are hundreds of scrabble enthusiasts. If you ever meet Mohan Chunkath, Shaik Ahmed, Akshay Bhandarkar or Varisht Hingorani, you should know that they have been the National Champions of the game. While the game was played in homes and small clubs, it was only in 1990 that Goa held an open Scrabble tournament. In 1998 V. Damaraj and Shaik Ahmed started spreading the good word as they travelled the country holding scrabble clinics and workshops. This was followed by club level, State level and national level tournaments. The Scrabble Association of India was formed and the World Scrabble Championship was organised in Mumbai in 2007.
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