To help us put names with faces, I have included in this post pictures of all of you in sections 19 and 20 with picture captions that list your names. I encourage you to review this page frequently. In between the pictures, I have included lists of first names that are also common nouns, making them playable in Scrabble.
- Al: a type of East Indian tree
- Alan: a breed of hunting dog (also aland, alant)
- Alec: a herring
- Ana: a collection of miscellany about a specific topic
- Ananda: extreme happiness
- Anna: a former Indian coin
- Ava: at all, of all
- Bailey: an outer castle wall
- Barbie: a barbecue
- Belle: a pretty woman
- Ben: an inner room
- Benny: an amphetamine pill
- Bertha: a style of wide collar
- Beth: a Hebrew letter
- Biff: to hit
- Bill: to charge for goods
- Billy: a short club
- Bo: a friend
- Bobby: a policeman
- Bonnie: pretty (also bonny)
- Brad: a small nail or tack
- Brock: a badger
- Carl: a peasant or manual laborer (also carle)
- Carol: to sing merrily
- Celeste: a percussive keyboard instrument (also celesta)
- Chad: a scrap of paper
- Charlie: a fool
- Chase: to pursue
- Chevy: to chase (also chivy)
- Christie: a type of turn in skiing (also christy)
- Clarence: an enclosed carriage
- Dalton: a unit of atomic mass
- Dagwood: a large, stuffed sandwich
- Daphne: a flowering shrub with poisonous berries
- Davy: a safety lamp
- Deb: a debutante
- Devon: a breed of cattle
- Dexter: located to the right
- Dom: a title given to some monks
- Don: to put on a piece of clothing
- Donna: an Italian woman of repute
- Erica: a shrub of the heath family
- Fay: to join together closely
- Florence: a former European gold coin
- Franklin: a nonnoble medieval English landowner
- Fritz: a nonworking or semi-functioning state
- Gilbert: a unit of magneto-motive force
- Gilly: to transport on a type of train car
- Graham: whole-wheat flour
- Hank: to secure a sail
- Henry: a unit of electric inductance
- Herby: full of herbs
- Jack: to hoist with a type of lever
- Jacky: a sailor
- Jake: okay, satisfactory
- Jane: a girl or woman
- Jay: any of various birds, known for their crests and shrill calls
- Jean: denim
- Jenny: a female donkey
- Jerry: a German soldier
- Jess: to fasten a strap around the leg of a bird in falconry (also Jesse)
- Jill: a unit of measure equal to to 1/4 of a pint
- Jimmy: to pry open
- Joannes: a Portugese coin (also johannes)
- Joe: a fellow
- Joey: a young kangaroo
- John: a toilet
- Johnny: a hospital gown
- Jones: a strong desire
- Jordan: a type of container
- Joseph: a woman’s long cloak
- Josh: to tease
- Kelly: a bright shade of green
- Kelvin: a unit of absolute temperature
- Ken: to know
- Kent: past tense of ken
- Kerry: a breed of cattle
- Kris: a curved dagger
- Lars: plural of lar, a type of ancient Roman guardian deity (also lares)
- Lassie: a lass
- Laura: an aggregation of hermitages used by monks
- Laurel: to crown one’s head with a wreath
- Lee: to shelter from the wind
- Louie: a lieutenant
- Louis: a former gold coin of France worth twenty francs
- Marcel: to make waves in the hair using a special iron
- Marge: a margin
- Mark: a line, figure, or symbol
- Martin: any type of the bird also known as a swallow
- Marvy: marvelous
- Matilda (a hobo’s bundle (chiefly Australian)
- Matt: to put a dull finish on (also matte)
- Maxwell: a unit of magnetic flux
- Mel: honey
- Melody: an agreeable succession of musical sounds
- Merle: a blackbird
- Mickey: a drugged drink
- Mike: a microphone (also mic)
- Milt: to fertilize with fish sperm
- Minny: a minnow
- Mo: a moment
- Molly: a type of tropical fish
- Morgan: a unit of frequency in genetics
- Morris: a type of folk dance from England
- Morse: describing a type of code made of long and short signals
- Mort: a note sounded in hunting to announce the death of prey
- Nelson: a type of wrestling hold
- Newton: the unit of force required to accelerate one kilogram of mass on meter per second
- Nick: to make a shallow cut
- Norm: a standard
- Pam: the name of the jack of clubs in some card games
- Parker: one who parks a motorized vehicle
- Peter: to lessen gradually
- Pia: a fine membrane of the brain and spinal cord
- Randy: sexually excited
- Regina: a queen
- Rex: a king
- Rick: to stack, hay, corn, or straw
- Roger: the pirate flag
- Sal: salt
- Sally: to make a brief trip or a sudden start
- Sawyer: one who saws wood
- Shawn: past tense of show
- Sheila: a girl or young woman
- Sol: the fifth note on a diatonic scale (also so)
- Sonny: a boy or young man
- Sophy: a former Persian ruler
- Spencer: a type of sail
- Tad: a young boy
- Tammie: a fabric used in linings (also tammy)
- Ted: to spread for drying
- Teddy: a woman’s one-piece undergarment
- Terry: a soft, absorbent type of cloth
- Tiffany: a thin, mesh fabric
- Timothy: a Eurasian grass used for grazing
- Toby: a drinking mug in the shape of a man or a man’s face
- Tod: a British unit of weight for wool equal to twenty-eight pounds
- Tom: the male of various animals
- Tommy: a loaf or chunk of bread
- Tony: very stylish
- Vera: very
- Victoria: a light, four-wheeled carriage
- Warren: an area where rabbits live, or a crowded maze-like place
- Webster: one who weaves
- Will: to choose, decree, or induce to happen
- Willow: a tree or shrub
- Willy: to clean fibers with a certain machine
Bonus Point Opportunity!
Students who correctly respond to the playable first names and last names question below will earn five bonus points for their first Check, Please! assignment.
How many students in English 1103.19 and 20 have first and/or last names that are playable Scrabble words? Keep in mind that only playable first names appear in the lists above. Some students in each section may have playable last names.
Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer
- Review the list of playable first names, compare it with the students’ first and last names in the photo captions above, or on the class page, and determine which of the students’ first and last names are playable in Scrabble. If you aren’t sure whether a name is also a common noun, you can consult the Scrabble website’s dictionary
- Compose a response of one or more complete sentences that includes (1) the number of students with playable names, and (2) the first and last name of each student with a playable name. Indicate which name, first or last, is playable.
- Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 9:00 a.m. on Monday, August 26.
- To post your comment, click the title of the post, “What’s in a Name. . . . ,” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a white rectangular box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and hit return. Voila! You have submitted your answer. Good luck! I will make the comments visible before class on Monday, August 26.
Next Up
For class on Monday, you will read David Sedaris’s essay “Me Talk Pretty On Day,” In class we will examine Sedaris’s essay as well as some of the collaborative writing that you composed on Wednesday.
Jane Lucas 
In all of these pictures of students, 21 of them have a first and/or last name that is playable. Out of all the students, these are the ones with playable names, Mark McLaughlin (only first name), Allie Early (only last name, Brad Weiner (first and last name), Eva Kelly (only last name), Chase Eller (only first name), Melody Smith (first and last), Stella Galindo Haas (only first name), Steven Lee (only last name), Bo Rattio (only first name), Stephanie Salters (only last name), James Emery (only last name), Bailey Dawkine (only first name), Dalton Holbrook (only first name), Tai Marchese (only last name), Willow Conley (only first name), Lexi Painter (only last name), Ananda Williams (only first name).
The number of students with playable names is 16. The students whose last names are playable are Tai Marchese, James Emery, Steven Lee, Melody Smith, Allie Early, Brad Weiner, Eva Kelly, Lexi Painter; along with my last name, Stephanie Salters. The students whose first names are playable are Dalton Holbrook, Bailey Dawkine, Bo Raitto, Melody Smith, Stella Galindo Haas, Mark McLaughlin, Brad Weiner, Chase Eller and Willow Conley.
Students with the playable scrabble name is 16 of them. The last names are Tai Marchese, James Emery, Steven Lee, Melody Smith, Allie Early, Brad Weiner, Eva Kelly, Lexi Painter, and Stephanie Salters.The first names that are playable are Dalton Holbrook, Bailey Dawkine, Bo Raitto, Melody Smith, Stella Galindo Haas, Mark McLaughlin, Brad Weiner, Chase Eller and Willow Conley. Surprised my name isn’t scrabble-able.
There are 11 students with playable first or last names in section 19 and 20, the first one being Mark McLaughlin with mark being the playable word. The second student with a playable word in their name is Allie Early, with early being the playable word. The third student with a playable name is Chase Eller with chase being the playable word. The fourth student with a playable name is Eva Kelly with kelly being the playable word. Brad Weiner is the fifth student with a playable name, with both his first name brad and last name weiner being playable words. The sixth student is Melody Smith with melody being the playable word in her name. Steven Lee is the seventh student with a playable word with lee being the playable word in his name. Bailey Dawkine is the eighth student with bailey being the playable word in his name. Dalton Holbrook is the ninth student with a playable word in his name with dalton being the playable word. Willow Conley is the tenth student with a playable word with Willow being the playable word in her name. The eleventh student with a playable word in their name is Lexi Painter with painter being the playable word.
Between the two classes there was a total of twenty playable names in the game of scrabble. The three full names that were playable were Parker Rice, Melody Smith, and Brad Weiner. The ten first names that are playable are Willow, Bailey, Dalton, Chase, Stella, Mark, Bo, Parker, Melody, and Brad. The ten last names are Emery, Marchese, Painter, Salters, Early, Kelly, Lee, Rice, Smith, and Weiner.
Stella Galindo Section 20
There are 13 students in sections 19 and 20 with playable scrabble names. These people are:
Bold = playable scrabble word
I found fifteen playable names in the Scrabble Dictionary between the two sections. The students’ names are Willow Conley, Lexi Painter, Tai Marchese, Dalton Holbrook, Stephanie Salters, James Emery, Steven Lee, Melody Smith, Stella Galindo Haas, Brad Weiner, Chase Eller, Mark McLaughlin, and Allie Early. The playable names include Willow, Painter, Marchese, Dalton, Salters, Emery, Lee, Melody, Smith, Stella, Brad, Weiner, Chase, Mark, and Early.
I found the following playable names in the section 19 class; Willow which means, “to clean textile fibers with a certain machine,” Dalton which means, “a unit of atomic mass,” Painter which means, “one that paints,” Salters which means “one that salts,” Marchese which means, “an Italian Nobleman,” Emery which means, “a granular corundum.” In section 20, I found the following playable names; Lee which means, “shelter from the wind,” Smith which means, “a worker in metals,” Melody which means, “An agreeable succession of music,” Stella which means, “A formerly used coin of the United States,” Weiner, Brad which means, “to fasten with thin nails,” Chase which means, “to pursue,” Mark which means, “to make a visible impression on,” Early which means, “near the beginning of a period of time or a series of events”.
“Scrabble Dictionary.” Hasbro Shop, shop.hasbro.com/en-us/scrabble-dictionary.