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How do you play scrabble at home on a real scrabble board?

 
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I wonder how the rest of the world plays scrabble on a real board. While playing with friends/family on a real board, I generally don't time the game and we make words that most people have at least heard of.
But SOWPODS dictionary also has these two letter, three letter, and four letter words that we normally don't use in speech. Like 'XIS', 'XI', 'XU', 'QI'. It seems that the online community has learned these words. The online players who have learned these words score high points just because of these weird two letter words. I wonder if they really know the meaning of these syllables or words. Now 'EE' is also a valid word!

So if you play the game with an online opponent and you don't know these ridiculous two letter and three letter words, you can't win the game.

I wonder if most of you all use these words even while playing the game on a real board at home?
 
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Serious players have a Scrabble dictionary with legitimate words. I am a serious player.

When I play with friends, we agree on the rules before starting. It's usually that if most of us have heard of the word, it is fair game. When I played with an ex-boyfriend (who was also a software developer), we agreed computer acronyms that we both knew were fine. A good way to get rid of an "X" tile is XSS .
 
Heena Agarwal
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Before I challenge my next opponent, this time I'm also going to learn some of these weird words.

I didn't understand how 'XSS' can get rid of the X tiles. X has 8 points. So I thought you'd rather want that tile along with an 'I' and an 'S', so you can make the only three letter word possible starting with X, i.e 'XIS'.

But perhaps you are referring to another dictionary? Here are the words I use.
 
Jeanne Boyarsky
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Heena Agarwal wrote:I didn't understand how 'XSS' can get rid of the X tiles.


It can with the rule we were using about computer acronyms being ok. (XSS stands from cross site scripting because CSS was already taken.)
 
Heena Agarwal
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Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:

Heena Agarwal wrote:I didn't understand how 'XSS' can get rid of the X tiles.


It can with the rule we were using about computer acronyms being ok. (XSS stands from cross site scripting because CSS was already taken.)



Oh. Nice.:-)
I will try this with my software engineer friends next time.
 
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Reminds me of a related joke in our local sitcom: a player claimed victory in Scrabble, because a common Czech word was not included in an official Scrabble dictionary. The dialogue went along these lines:

- 'Chair' doesn't exist.
- What am I sitting on right now?
- It's not in the dictionary. It's called 'chrair'
- It must be a misprint, then.
- Doesn't matter. What is printed, counts.

Makes me wonder whether there are misprints in the real world Scrabble dictionaries and what to do about them.
 
Heena Agarwal
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In my third game that I played just now, I won. I said yay. And my opponent said, 'yay for using the cheat-sheets'!

Actually he/she was right. I had the sowpods dictionary open for referring to those two lettered words.
After some discussion, I agreed that I was referring to those sheets cause I was new. And I lost my first game cause my opponent made only those two lettered words and placed high score tiles in blue and red boxes.
So we decided to play one more game in which I wouldn't refer to cheat sheets.

(S)he was like 'what is ho'.
I said I didn't refer to cheat sheets. Everyone knows what 'ho' is. It's that expression like 'ha'. ( I was not referring to cheat-sheets really.)
(S)he said so is 'qi', and 'xi'.

I lost this one cause it was my fourth game and I was doing some other chores also while playing. But it's addicting. I think I like those 'ridiculous two letter and three letter words' now.
 
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I hate scrabble. I can never figure out what words to make from a random set of characters. I am great at spelling, but somehow my brain doesn't work the other way.

I'm great at programming. So, one day I was playing online and getting frustrated, and I made a program to help me suggest words. I put in the scrabble dictionary, and would give it character patterns, and it would give mea list of matches. So,like Q..e. would return queen. Then I figured put I could make it sort the words by points

So. I began to cheat and used the program to beat everyone in Scrabble. Scrabble became incredibly boring after that. I stopped cheating, and then I figured out why I hate scrabble. So, by cheating, not only did I not stop hating scrabble, i made it boring to boot.
 
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Heena Agarwal wrote:Everyone knows what 'ho' is. It's that expression like 'ha'.


Um, yes. That's exactly what I was thinking. Of course.
 
Jayesh A Lalwani
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I really don't know what you were guessing Mike, but I'm guessing that your guess is closer to the real definition that Heena's guess
 
Heena Agarwal
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Mike Simmons wrote:

Heena Agarwal wrote:Everyone knows what 'ho' is. It's that expression like 'ha'.


Um, yes. That's exactly what I was thinking. Of course.



Mike, it felt like he was giving me 'the expression' for making a word called 'ho' despite the promise.
 
Mike Simmons
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Well, in US slang, it's not a terribly obscure word. But maybe a bit surprising in polite conversation.
 
Mike Simmons
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In fairness though, there's also a perfectly valid clean definition, not very obscure. As in Santa's "Ho, ho, ho!" Which seems perfectly fine for Heena's purposes.

Then again, is xi really obscure? Surely if you'd allow alpha, beta, gamma, or delta, why not the rest of the Greek alphabet?
 
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Mike Simmons wrote:In fairness though, there's also a perfectly valid clean definition, not very obscure. As in Santa's "Ho, ho, ho!" Which seems perfectly fine for Heena's purposes.



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