Word for Wednesday: Scrabble

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We have a confession to make, here in the Spellzone office we’ve been addicted to Scrabble for the last few months. The intensely addictive blend of chance and skill combined with our love for words has led to plenty of office rivalry.

Scrabble is one of the best selling board games ever with a whopping 150 million units sold worldwide. If word games really are that popular perhaps we’re in the right business!

Playing Scrabble is a great way to discover new words, recall words readily, and learn or reinforce spellings. In fact we were surprised at the amount of new words we discovered purely by fooling around with our tiles including the terribly lazy (but high scoring!) abbreviation of pizza, ‘za’.

The meaning of the word Scrabble is pivotal to the game itself. In case you don’t know what it means, ‘scrabble’ is a verb meaning to ‘feel searchingly’ perhaps related to the Dutch ‘schrabben’, ‘to scratch’. So by rooting around in that little green sack hoping desperately for a good hand of tiles you are, in fact, ‘scrabbling’.

Please reassure us that we’re not the only ones with a Scrabble problem by sharing any unusual words you’ve discovered recently!

Hugh MacDermott


09 Apr 2014
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"This is a fantastic opportunity for our students!  I'm sure Spellzone will be invaluable in helping them to improve their spellings and therefore improve the quality of their writing in all subject areas!"

Teacher, High School, UK