Category: Scrabble

In the previous weeks, I published blog posts featuring the playable two-letter words that begin with a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, and l. Today’s post features the playable two-letter words beginning with m, n, o, and p. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the other two-letter words in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.

M, by the way, is the most versatile consonant. In the first position, m pairs with every vowel: ma, me, mi, mo, mu, and also my. In the second position, m pairs with every vowel except i: am, em, om, um.

• ma: a mother
• me: a singular objective pronoun
• mi: a tone of the diatonic scale
• mm: an expression of assent
• mo: a moment
• mu: a Greek letter
• my: a first-person possessive adjective
• na: no, not
• ne: born with the name of (also nee)
• no: a negative answer
• nu: a Greek letter
• od: a hypothetical force
• oe: a whirlwind off the Faero Islands
• of: originating from
• oh: an exclamation of surprise
• oi: an expression of dismay (also oy)
• om: a sound used as a mantra
• on: the batsman’s side in cricket
• op: a style of abstract art dealing with optics
• or: the heraldic color gold
• os: a bone
• ow: used to express pain
• ox: a clumsy person
• oy: an expression of dismay (also oi)
• pa: a father
• pe: a Hebrew letter
• pi: a Greek letter

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Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review this post.

In the previous weeks, I published one blog post featuring playable two-letter words beginning with a and a second blog post featuring playable two-letter words beginning with b, d, and e. Today’ s blog post features playable two-letter words beginning with f, g, h, i, j, k, and l. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the other two-letter words in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.

• fa: a tone on the diatonic scale
• fe: a Hebrew letter
• gi: a white garment worn in martial arts
• go: a Japanese board game
• ha: used to express surprise
• he: a pronoun signifying a male
• hi: an expression of greeting
• hm: used to express consideration
• ho: used to express surprise
• id: the least censored part of the three-part psyche
• if: a possibility
• in: to harvest (a verb, takes -s, -ed, -ing)
• is: the third-person singular present form of “to be”
• it: a neuter pronoun
• jo: a sweetheart
• ka: the spiritual self in ancient Egyptian spirituality
• ki: the vital life force in Chinese spirituality (also qi)
• la: a tone of the diatonic scale
• li: a Chinese unit of distance
• lo: an expression of surprise

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Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review this post.

The first Scrabble blog post of the semester featured playable two-letter words beginning with “a.” Learning those two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and can increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.

Here’s a list of the playable words beginning with “b,” “d,” and “e.”

• ba: the soul in ancient Egyptian spirituality
• bi: a bisexual
• bo: a pal
• by: a side issue
• de: of; from
• do: a tone on a scale
• ed: education
• ef: the letter f (also eff)
• eh: used to express doubt
• el: an elevated train
• em: the letter m
• en: the letter n
• er: used to express hesitation
• es: the letter s
• et: a past tense of eat
• ex: the letter x

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Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review this blog post.

Last Friday’s blog post offered you the opportunity to earn bonus points if you posted a response that identified the names of students in sections nineteen and twenty with first and last names that are also common nouns, making them playable Scrabble words. The lists below include those students’ names with the playable names in bold.

Section 19

• Kira Booker (one who books)
• Annika Brown (brown color or pigment)
• McKinnley Coles (pl. of cole, a plant of the cabbage family)
• Jess English (to fasten straps around the legs of a hawk)
• Jack Hutchins (to raise with a type of lever)
• Jack Madigan-Green (to raise with a type of lever, green color or pigment)
• Larisa Shaw (stalks and leaves of root plants)
• Hannah Smith (a metal worker)
• Simone Smith (a metal worker)
• Olivia Wall (an upright structure that encloses an area)

Section 20

• Ava Gaudioso (of all)
• Santino Hall (a corridor or a large room for assembly)
• Lily Murphy (a potato)
• Regan Shea (an African tree)
• Chaning Smith (a metal worker)
• Autumn Spaulding (the season between summer and winter)
• Renae West (the direction opposite of east)

Continue to review last Friday’s blog post, both to increase your word power and to put your classmates’ names with faces.

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Next Up

Tomorrow in class we will examine an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of your pieces of collaborative writing from January 10, and David Sedaris‘s “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”

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
• Anna: a former Indian coin
• Ava: at all, of all
• 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
• Chevy: to chase (also chivy)
• Christie: a type of turn in skiing (also christy)
• Clarence: an enclosed carriage
• 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
• 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

Not pictured in section 19: Skylar Bollman, Kira Booker

• 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
• 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
• Willy: to clean fibers with a certain machine

Not pictured in section 20: Courtney Faber, Ava Gaudioso, Gracie Lare

Bonus Point Opportunity!

Students who correctly respond to the playable first names and last names question below will earn five bonus points for his/her/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 have playable last names.

Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer

1. 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
2. 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.
3. Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by noon on Monday, January 15.
4. 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 Wednesday, January 17.

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Next Up

Although class will not meet on Monday, to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy, I have assigned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” which is linked both to its title here and to its title on your course calendar at the end of your syllabus. After you read King’s essay, compose a response to it in your journal that includes a one-paragraph summary, followed by a second paragraph of commentary (your response to King’s writing). When our class resumes on Wednesday, we will examine excerpts from the King’s essay.

Parallel play increases your score through the points you earn by spelling more than one word in a single turn. In the first play of the hypothetical game pictured above, the first player or team would score sixteen points by spelling enact with the t on the center double-word square. With the second turn, the other player or team could take advantage of the opportunity for parallel play. If the team knew that aa is a type of lava, they could earn twenty-four points with four words: whoa, he, on, and aa.

Aa is one of sixteen playable two-letter words beginning with a. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.

• aa: a type of stony, rough lava
• ab: an abdominal muscle
• ad: an advertisement
• ae: one
• ag: agriculture
• ah: an exclamation
• ai: a three-toed sloth
• al: a type of East Indian tree
• am: the first-person singular present form of to be
• an: an indefinite article
• ar: the letter r
• as: similar to
• at: in the position of
• aw: an expression of sadness or protest
• ax: a type of cutting tool (also axe)
• ay: a vote in the affirmative (also aye)

Important Note about Challenges

The game rules inside the Scrabble box top do not specify that a player or team that challenges a playable word will lose a turn, but David Bukszpan’s book Is That a Word? notes that the player or team does lose a turn. According to Bukszpan:

“[I]f a word is challenged and found not to be legal (called a phony in Scrabble parlance), the player that set it down loses a turn. Conversely, if a challenged word is found to be playable, the challenger loses his turn” (19).

Work Cited

Bukszapan, David. Is That a Word?: From AA to ZZZ, the Weird and Wonderful Language of SCRABBLE. Chronicle, 2012. p.19.

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Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, look to the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review this post devoted to Scrabble tips.

This final Scrabble post of the semester features the names of authors and characters that are playable words. Learning these will not only increase your word power (and up your game), it will also broaden your knowledge of literature. If you haven’t read some of classics listed here, I encourage you to check them out.

• eyre: a long journey (the last name of of the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847)
• dickens: a devil (Charles Dickens, 1812-1870)
• fagin: a person, usually an adult, who instructs others, usually children, in crime (from a character of that type in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, 1838)
• holden: the past participle of hold (Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 1951)
• huckleberry: a berry like a blueberry (the first name of the title character in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, 1884)
• oedipal: describing libidinal feelings of a child toward the parent of the opposite sex (from the title character in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, c. 429 B.C.)
• quixote: a quixotic, or extremely idealistic person; also quixotry, a quixotic action or thought (the title character in Michael de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Part I: 1605, Part II: 1615)

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Next Up

Your final assignment for the course will be your individual oral presentation, which you will deliver during the exam period. See my December 4 blog post, and the handout I distributed that day, for detailed instructions.

Today’s Scrabble post features Shakespeare characters whose names are also playable common nouns.

• ariel: a gazelle found in Africa (Ariel, The Tempest, 1611-12)
• dogberry: the fruit of a dogwood tree (Dogberry, Much Ado about Nothing, 1598-1599)
• hamlet: a village (the title character of Hamlet, 1600-1601)
• lear: learning (the title character of King Lear, 1605-1606)
• puck: a disk used in ice hockey and other games (Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595-1596)
• romeo: a seductive lover, a male lover (one of the title characters in Romeo and Juliet, 1594-1595)
• shylock: to lend money with a high interest rate (Shylock, The Merchant of Venice, 1596-1597)

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Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.

Last week’s Scrabble post featured a list of toponyms (place names) in the first half of the alphabet. This post includes a list of toponyms in the second half. Learning these playable place names will broaden your vocabulary and up your game.

• oxford: a type of shoe, also known as a bal or balmoral
• panama: a type of wide-brimmed hat
• paris: a type of plant found in Europe and Asia that produces a lone, poisonous berry
• roman: a romance written in meter
• scot: an assessed tax
• scotch: to put an end to; or to etch or scratch (as in hopscotch)
• sherpa: a soft fabric used for linings
• siamese: a water pipe providing a connection for two hoses
• swiss: a sheer, cotton fabric
• texas: a tall structure on a steamboat containing the pilothouse
• toledo: a type of sword known for its fine craftsmanship, originally from Toledo
• wale: to injure, to create welts on the skin
• warsaw: a type of grouper fish
• waterloo: a definitive defeat
• zaire: a currency of Zaire

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Next Up

Monday marks our last class before Thanksgiving Break. Class activities TBA.

On a recent Wordplay Day, some students said that they didn’t remember that place names that aren’t also common nouns aren’t playable in Scrabble. The list that follows includes place names, or toponyms, in the first half of the alphabet that are playable in Scrabble. Learning these words will broaden your vocabulary and up your game.

• afghan: a wool blanket
• alamo: a cottonwood poplar tree
• alaska: a heavy fabric
• berlin: a type of heavy fabric
• bermudas: a variety of knee-length, wide-legged shorts
• bohemia: a community of unconventional, usually artistic, people
• bolivia: a soft fabric
• bordeaux: a wine from the Bordeaux region
• boston: a card game similar to whist
• brazil: a type of tree found in Brazil used to make instrument bows (also brasil)
• brit: a non-adult herring
• cayman: a type of crocodile, also known as a spectacled crocodile (also caiman)
• celt: a type of axe used during the New Stone Age
• chile: a spicy pepper (also chili)
• colorado: used to decsribe cigars of medium strength and color
• congo: an eellike amphibian
• cyprus: a thin fabric
• dutch: referring to each pperson paying for him or herself
• egyptian: a sans serif typeface
• english: to cause a ball to spin
• french: to slice food thinly
• gambia: a flowering plant known as cat’s claw (also gambier, which is a small town in Ohio)
• geneva: gin, or a liquor like gin
• genoa: a type of jib (a triangular sail), also known as a jenny, first used by a Swedish sailor in Genoa
• german: also known as the german cotillon, an elaborate nineteenth-century dance
• greek: something not understood
• guinea: a type of British coin minted from 1663 to 1813
• holland: a linen fabric
• japan: to gloss with black lacquer
• java: coffee
• jordan: a chamber pot
• kashmir: cashmere
• mecca: a destination for many people

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.