The Scribble on Scrabble

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Good old-fashioned pop culture games edition.
Yeah. And, yeah, here we are, finally talking about Scrabble.
I've been asking for you to do this with me for at least a decade and you kept refusing.

I still don't know why. Even Jerry chimed in and was like, will you guys please do Scrabble? And finally you relented.
I think just because you wanted me and Jerry to stop bothering you about it. That was probably it.
A big thanks to Laura for her help on this one. What was your nickname for her?

Dr. Claw.

Dr. Claw.

Do you play Scrabble?

Are you a Scrabble? Are you a Scrabbler? I just kind of wanted to get that out of the way. You know, I wish I were.
I'm not, and it's not like I have an aversion to it or anything like that. It's just not part of my world, I guess, you know? Yeah, same.
I mean, we own it, and I have played Scrabble here and there. If somebody's like, hey, let's play Scrabble, I won't go like, no, sorry, not going to do it.
But, you know, I'll play very occasionally, but I've never been a regular Scrabbler, nor am I very good at it at all, especially if I'm playing against somebody who, you know, because there's a lot more to it than just, like, knowing words. Well, I feel like based on Stuff You Should Know History, our best episodes are ones where we explain games that we don't actually play.
Soccer, chess. Yeah.
I mean, the list just keeps going on. I feel like we're about to add to it.
Yeah. Surfing.
Yeah, surfing. I mean, we should probably just say that Scrabble, if you don't know, it's a board game in which two to four players use letters, little tiles, to spell out words on a board in a crossword-like fashion.

Wow, that was a good description, Chuck.

In other words, you know, the words have to intersect each other.

You can't just throw a random word out there in the corner if you feel like it.

They have to touch and use a letter, or I guess a blank space, for another word. And, by the way, I just want to go ahead and, because Scrabble people are probably going to get mad at us, but I'm going to go ahead and throw out a suggested rule change.
Okay. There is a word, Scrabble, and that means to, as a verb, to scratch or grope to try and collect something, or as a noun, the act of doing that.
And I propose that if you play that eight-letter word, that not only do you get your bingo bonus for playing a seven-letter word, I think you should, if you play the word Scrabble, you should get an extra bonus on top of that. Of how many points? A million? Whatever's fair.
That's where I just step back and say you guys handle it. Okay.
You like to kick the hornet's nest and then watch them go. I just think, I don't know, if you play the word Scrabble, give it just a little bump.
I agree. I think you're right.
All right. That's my only suggestion.
My only note. A little more about it.
The Scrabble board is 15 by 15 squares, 225 total squares. And because it's 15 by 15, you're limited to no more than 15-letter words.
And I guess just a quick summary of the rules. So when you play that first word, you have to play it in the center square.
That's where you start. And you can build off of other people's words.
You get up to 15-letter words by building onto other words because you could never spell more than a seven-letter word because at no point in time do you ever have more than seven tiles. Right.
And as I said, that seven tiles played at once is called a bingo. You add up your score at the end and tack on 50 points at that point.
Right. Or however many you get.
Apparently, experts can play like, you know, three, four or five of those in a game sometimes. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. That's a great way to run up scores from what I can tell.
And then across the board, there's triple word scores, double word scores, double letter scores, and triple letter scores. And basically, when you lay a tile over that, depending on whether it's a letter or a word, you get bonus points for it.
So, when you're, like, if you play a bingo across, like, a triple word score, you got a bunch of points. You basically just dusted your opponent in that one move, essentially.
Yeah, I mean, if you're just sort of amateur funsies, Scrabble people, one big bingo like that can seal the game for you. Yeah.
It's called sending them packing with tears in their eyes, I think. In France, by the way, the bingo is called a Scrabble.
Just other nuts and bolts. You know, the tiles come in a little, they're little wooden tiles, little wooden square tiles.
And on the tile is a letter and then a point value sort of as a subscript. And then you keep your letters on a little wooden tile rack.
And you, ideally, your opponent does not see those. Like, you know, it's, they're facing away from you if you're opposite your opponent.
And that's a big part of an expert or at least an accomplished or experienced Scrabblist is dummies like me, and I guess you, if you and I played, we'd just sit down and try and spell fart every chance we got. If you're an experienced Scrabblist, you're almost like counting cards.
Like, you know how many letters are in the bag of like how many of each letter in the bag and you see them being played. You know how many are on your rack.
You know how many are still in the pile. So you're sort of trying to figure out mathematical possibilities of what's still out there and what can be played.
Like that's the next level stuff. Yeah, for sure.
And it's not like evenly distributed. For example, there's 12 E's, but there's only one J, K, Q, X, and Z.
And then the other letters are just kind of distributed in weird random ways. So that like you could, I guess, easily count that stuff.
If you play Scrabble enough, you're just going to pick up on how many are out there at any given point. Yeah.
You've also got your blank tiles, which are worth zero points. But those really help out in making words possible that you couldn't get ordinarily.
And then you've got your one-pointers, A-E-I-L-N-O-R-S-T, and you. And also, just real quick, I did some poking around, Chuck, and I found that there's some mnemonic devices that tournament-level players use to remember how many points a particular letter gets.
You should say that after I list them all. Well, I was going to just do it by group, if that's okay with you.
Sure.

So the first group, one point, they use astronauts eat in limbo.

No.

Right, silly tiger.

Umbrella.

All right.

The two pointers are D and G.

Dave and Gary.

Okay.

I would say doggone.

Three points are B, C, M, and P.

That is B, chewing, emasticating pizza.

Does someone really suggest like, hey, use these and don't make up your own?

No, I'm making this up.

I got you. This is all a bit.

Okay. Four points.
We got F, H, V, and W, and Y.

Right. So for heaven's vague, Y, U.

Okay.

I get it now.

Mm-hmm.

You should have told me this was a bit.

Five-pointers, you get your K.

K.

Okay.

Eight-pointers, J and X.

Jackson loves Xanax.

Okay.

Jackson loves? Yeah, you just have to ignore the L. Okay.
All right. And then your 10-pointer, Josh.
What are we going to end up with Q and Z? Quartz and quartz. That's great.
I think I got it. You got it? Yeah, give me a quiz at the end.
I'll put this away and then you can just quiz me. Yeah, once you learn that, you'll never forget it.
There is a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon, Andrew Thomas, who says if you go first, you have an advantage of 14 points. If you have that blank tile ever in the game, that's an advantage of 30 points if you're good at Scrabble, not like me.
Right. There's also, like if you have S tiles, there's a 10-point advantage.
And the reason why I was like, that doesn't make any sense because S, as you remember from your mnemonic device, is only a one-point tile. You should throw that on the end though, right? Yeah, that's the thing.
So like if you add, if you, like I said, you can add on to other words that are already on the board, even ones that another player wrote out. And whatever word score they got for that word, if you add an S, you get that same word score plus one point for the S.
So that's a really easy way to rack up some quick points. Totally.
And I think also probably annoy other players. I wonder about that.
I'd like to hear from Scrabblers. I mean, if it's fair game, it's fair game.
Totally. And I think also probably annoy other players.
I wonder about that.

I'd like to hear from Scrabblers. I mean, if it's fair game, it's fair game.
Yes. But there's plenty of rules that are fair game that are also like, you're a jackass.
Yeah, that's a good point. Let me see here.
What else do we have? We have X and Z give you a three to five point advantage, even though they're tougher to use. And the Q is a five point disadvantage because, I mean, I was about to say you always have to have that U, but I'm sure there are weird Scrabble words that don't have a QU.
There's two that I know of. One is QI.
QI? Yeah, I think I heard that. QI? No, sorry, that's Qi, like life force, I think.
Okay. And you get 11 points for that one.
And then I can't remember. There's one more that's like a Q word that does not require a U.
Oh, no, QI is in here because that's the highest scoring two-letter word along with ZA. Is that what you said? Yeah.
And I looked up ZA, and it's slang for pizza. I'm not certain that that usage is allowed, but it's also an archaic word for a B-flat notation.
Yeah, I wonder if, because I did the same thing you did. Every time they gave, Laura found an example of a word that's unusual or high-scoring, I always looked it up because I was curious.
I wonder if that's part of the love of Scrabble is actually learning what these words mean or if they're like, I really don't care. I just care how much it's worth.
Well, from what I can tell, Scrabble players don't care what a word means. They don't think of them like that.
And I mean, they'll come up later with those controversial words. Oh, sure.
Yeah, good point. Yeah, it's just us.
We're curious types. Scrabble players are not.
That's true. The highest scoring three-letter word is Zach's 19-pointer, and Zek is 16.
Quiz is a four-letter word worth the most at 22. That means like a test of sorts.
Okay. And then Zippy, what does that mean? The pinhead.
Zippy the pinhead? What's that? Oh, it's a really weird 80s comic strip.

You know, the clown with the Zippy the Pinhead.

No, I don't know it.

You should look it up.

It's weird.

It's a weird comic strip.

Okay.

I don't know it.

But it couldn't be that.

Sorry.

I have to correct myself before all of the Scrabble players email in.

It couldn't be Zippy the Pinhead because Zippy the Pinhead would be a proper noun. Ah, okay.
Good point. Thanks.
You can't use proper nouns. No, you can't.
Might as well go ahead and say that. They're really serious about that stuff too.
Oh, I bet. See, I'm a house rules guy, so I can, you know, as long as everyone's on board, I think you can have your own house rules.

Oh, I agree.

Don't bring that into a tournament.

No.

Get that mess out of here is what they'll tell you. Yeah.
But like if I were to play with Ruby, I'd probably say like, hey, we can use proper nouns because she'll want to put our dog's name or something. That's awesome.
Or maybe I would. Right.
I did look up the highest scoring bingo, and that is Muzjiks, M-U-Z-J-I-K-S, which is a Russian peasant. Wow.
It's probably Muzjiks or something. Yeah.
I like it both ways, though. Muzjiks.
Look at all the Muzjiks toiling in the field. Yeah, I like that.
So I was confused because there's a lot of, like one of the rules is no proper nouns, no words that end in apostrophe or require an apostrophe. Yeah.
And then also no foreign words. But clearly some foreign words are allowed in because they're so common in English that they've just basically been adopted into the language.
I get that. But a muzjix is not a common word in English.
So it must mean that that does appear in some English dictionary somewhere, because that's kind of the great ruler, arbiter. But I just don't see how it could be.
That's just weird to me. Well, what's weird is your college band, I know for a fact, was Jay Clark and the Muzz Chicks.
Yes, but we were trying to be exotic, you know. And we should also say that Scrabble, I think, is now up to 30 languages all over the world.
And apparently that can be problematic. Like in France, you can add an E and an S to many, many words.
So it can kind of get out of hand with the score totals there. And our beloved Germany, and I never really thought about this, but German words are long.
So there's not a lot of, I mean, sure, there are obviously words shorter than seven words in Germany, but a lot less than a lot of other languages. Yeah, it's true.
So it must just be bingo city or whatever bingo city is in German. There's also bingo, I don't know, what city? Bingo Bird? Stadt, maybe? Bingo Stock.
Sure. So in some other countries too, in foreign language versions of Scrabble, there are some adjustments with the tiles.
Like some have more than 100 tiles. Oh, right.
Because of weird little letters. Yeah.
There's like double L and double R in the Spanish language version. Right.
There's also the N with the tilde over it. That's also a tile.
Yeah. Spice it up a little.
Yeah. I think that's worth eight points.
Nice. Yeah.
but you have to remember that that's eight points. You have to say nice.

Right. Should we

take a break? I like how this is headed.

Yeah. All right.
We'll be right back.

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It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.

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And if you're going to talk about Scrabble, you got to talk about Alfred Mosher Butts, because he is the gentleman who invented this game. This is in 1938.
He was an unemployed architect at the time and just into games. He's from Poughkeepsie, but I believe the game was actually invented.
Actually, I know this for a fact. In Jackson Heights, Queens, because at 81st Street and 35th Avenue, I believe, is a Scrabble-style street sign.
I think it's 35th Avenue has below each of the letters just the little number value subscript, which is kind of just a little nice, fun, cute nod. Are you sure it's just that that community in particular isn't big Scrabble fans? Yeah, I'm positive.
Okay. So he, did you say he was an unemployed architect? Yeah, at the time.
And he was just into gaming and wanted to invent a game that was part chance, part skill. Yeah.

So he did not have a great success with it out of the gate. He initially tried to call it lexico and crisscross words.

And he took it around to game manufacturers.

And they're like, nah, I'm not really feeling this.

And that was the way it went for a good decade before a man named James Bruneau bought the rights. He saw something in it that I guess other people didn't.
He renamed it Scrabble. He changed the gameplay a little bit.
One of the biggest changes he made was that the way that Mosier Butts had come up with is that you just thought the word in like a kind of a mental version of the board and the other player hopefully he was able to pick up on the word you were thinking. And so Bruno was like, maybe we should just replace this with an actual board and tiles.
And that really kind of helped move things along a bunch. Yeah, you know, I looked up this James Bruno.
And, you know, we get a lot of great information a lot of times from New York Times obituaries.

And he was a friend of Butts, and so they used to play Scrabble together on occasion, like their homemade version.

And once this guy took it over, he and his wife Helen, like, operated out of their house.

And he was like, at a certain point, like, all that was in our house was boxes of tiles and racks and boards.

And we couldn't move around, so they had to, they moved to an abandoned schoolhouse and then eventually a converted woodworking shop. And they had 35 employees working two shifts, producing 6,000 Scrabble sets a week by 1953.
So within five years of him buying the rights.

That is correct, sir.

OK, so that that the year before that, I've seen it told as a legend or a widely told

story.

Laura put it.

I don't know why no one's like, yeah, that's what happened.

But supposedly the president of Macy's came across the game. I'm not sure how.
Played it. Liked it.
Ordered a bunch to stock up. Of course, that meant gimbals immediately followed suit.
And so the game took off from there. So this would have been 1952 when that supposedly happened.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
And Bruno was like, we can't possibly keep up with this demand. Like this is just skyrocketed, which is great.
But they turned to a company, a game maker called Selcho and Ryder, and they took over making the game. And they did so for decades.
They were the people who made Scrabble for a really long time.

Within two years,

two years of that great Macy's president story

happening,

four and a half million copies were sold.

It just hit America

like a giant packet of Pop Rocks

and Diet Coke for Mentos.

Yeah, or like a T-O-N-N-E of bricks, which is worth more than Diet Coke for Mentos. Yeah.

Or like a T-O-N-N-E of bricks, which is worth more than T-O-N.

Nice, Joe.

So that's selling pretty good.

I think they've sold, they estimate about 150 million total sets as of, you know, kind

of now.

Yeah.

Even though it's hard to get a real firm number on that.

But they bought that trademark, Selcho and Ryder.

I don't want to say Richter there, but it is Ryder.

Bought that trademark from them in 72.

Bruno got a million and a half bucks, which would be about 12 million today.

And this, by the way, was like he was looking for something to do in retirement.

So he really scored.

That's a triple letter retirement gig, I would say.

Right.

Or triple word even.

And then the inventor, Mr. Butts, got 265 grand, which would be about $2 million.

Plus he got a very small royalty that he seemed to be pretty happy with.

Yeah.

He sounds like a great guy.

This is one of the more heartwarming quotes I've come across in a while.

Agreed.

He was interviewed in 1984 about his invention. And he said, people are always asking me if I'm rich.
I used to get two to three cents for each game sold. One third went to taxes.
I gave one third away and the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life. Great.
And if there's such thing as heaven, I believe that Mr. Butts is there right now.
I think so, too. He would have been in his 80s then, too, because I think he died in the early 90s in his 90s.
Okay. Well, there you go.
He had a great life, apparently. I love it.
So things turned kind of dark when the Cabbage Patch Kids bought Selcho and Ryder in 1986. You want to hear something funny? What? Every time I looked at that word, I said Colco.
Oh, really? I was like, that's so weird. Like, I grew up with Coleco toys.
Yeah. And I just kept seeing it as Colco.
And I was like, wait a minute, dummy, it's Coleco. Well, you must be a Scrabblist because that would just be like the word construct without any kind of meaning to it.

So you're in there, Chuck.

You really did some method research.

Yeah, maybe so.

So Coleco, yes, bought Selcho and Ryder and just did not really give much of a care about Scrabble. I mean, it was just a moneymaker to them.
Apparently, they were already in trouble, which is nuts that they declared bankruptcy by 1989. I think, I can't remember.
Surely we talked about it in our Cabbage Patch Kids episode why that happened. but to go from having one of the hottest toys in the history of toys to bankrupt in the same decade is breathtaking as far as business goes.
But when Coleco declared bankruptcy, Hasbro stepped in and they did seem to care a lot more about Scrabble. And so under their ownership, I think it's still owned by Hasbro, if I'm not mistaken.
It's been fine. It's had its ups and downs, as we'll see.
But there was also a bidding war for the international rights to produce Scrabble, and Mattel beat them out for that. And that, I can't imagine what aplomb that is.
But it also occurred to me, and I know we've done an episode on intellectual property, but there's some fictitious right out there that says this one company is allowed to produce all the games just internationally. This other company has this other fictitious right to produce all the games just inside of the United States.
And it's just so mind blowing to me that we've just kind of created that that kind of made up structure for things and how much just gobs of money that that legal fiction creates for people. Are you pushing for just an open source world? No, not necessarily.
I don't have a problem with it. I was more just astounded by it.
You know? Yeah. No, it's interesting.
I mean, have you ever dug into TV rights for professional sports leagues? Oh, my God. I'll bet that's quite a jungle.
Yeah, it is. And it's gotten really, really expensive.
When you see the numbers, Amazon acquires the right to air whatever, Sunday Night Football or something. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I. It's just astounding what kind of money we're talking about.
For sure. Anyway, I guess we can move on to competitive Scrabble because, you know, a lot of people just play for funsies at home.
I know our bud John Hodgman and his lovely wife, Catherine, play like for decades now because they're high school sweethearts. So they're long, long, long term scrabblers, you know, against each other.
I kind of wanted to find out if there was a lifetime record that they keep up with. Surely.
But then I just decided not to ask. Yeah.
Hodgman used to live tweet their games. Oh, he did? Yeah.
It was really cute to just kind of follow along. I bet they're both good because Catherine's an English teacher and John knows a lot of words.
Yeah. Anybody who knows Hodgman, too, right when they saw the Scrabble episode of Stuff You Should Know, knew that there was a 100% chance that Hodgman was going to come up at some point in time for sure.
He would have complained if we hadn't. Yeah, for sure.
He's a Scrabble guy for sure. Yeah, he would smoke me.
In fact, I feel like I might have played him once on one of these trips that I used to do with him for maximum fun. But I don't know.
If we did play, it was not even competitive at all. I'm sure.
I don't see why he would have played. I don't see why he would have played me because I'm really just, you know, I'm like Steve Carell and Anchorman.
I like I'll try to spell lamp just because I looked at one, you know. Hey, man, if it gets you some points, who cares? Yeah.
You and I probably pretty good matchup. Yeah, I think so, too.
We should play sometime. Yeah.
Okay, so... That sounded unenthusiastic.
I meant, hell yeah, buddy. All right.
Sorry, you can't see me, but I'm raising the roof right now. Yeah, let's do it.
So, you mentioned competitive Scrabble, that there are tournaments, which isn't very surprising. I mean, people are into Scrabble.
So when you start throwing money down for like prize money for tournaments, people are going to flock to them. And for years, the main, the biggest Scrabble tournament, what they called nationals, was the North American Invitational Scrabble Players Tournament, which had its inaugural championship in 1978 and was held every year through to 2009.
And Selcho and Ryder actually formed the National Scrabble Association, which was very smart because that kind of thing generates a lot of interest, enthusiasm, newspapers cover. Oh, it's so crazy.

There's a Scrabble championship right now. And like, it just helps keep the thing topical, you know, instead of just letting people buy it and crossing your fingers, that kind of thing.
It was a pretty smart business venture. And then, like I said, Coleco came along.
they did nothing for it.

Apparently the Players Association had said, Coleco came along. They did nothing for it.

Apparently, the Players Association had to shame Coleco into chipping in $5,000 for prize money for the national tournament. And then when Hasbro came along, they started funding it a lot more lavishly.
But then they kind of said, you know, this isn't actually worth it anymore. You guys are, you know, maybe a few hundred people coming to these tournaments.
And you all have all of the Scrabble boards that you're ever going to need. You're not going to buy anymore.
So they stopped funding those. And they actually shut down the National Scrabble Association.
So an independent version came up, the North American Scrabble Players Association. I think back in 2009 is when it was formed.
Yeah. And before anyone writes in, technically they didn't completely shut down the NSA.
They just stopped there. They weren't in charge of the tournaments anymore.
They just, they moved them over to another program called School Scrabble. Yes, because those kids have a long life of buying Scrabble boards ahead of them.
That's right. You mentioned ups and downs over the years.
You know, I guess all board games go through kind of boom periods and bust periods, or at least low periods, and Scrabble is no different. There was an early 2000s boom.
There were televised tournaments. It's interesting what drives this stuff.
I don't know if they know on the inside, but I couldn't figure out why it would have had a boom in the 2000s, early 2000s. Oh, a documentary called Word Freaks, I believe.
Oh, is that what did it? It introduced it to a whole new generation. Oh, okay.
Well, there you have it. Yeah.
And it took off like Hasbro has a lot to be thankful for from that documentary, from what I understand. Oh, I bet the New York Times crossword documentary, too, kicked that up a notch.
Yeah, for sure. That was a great one.
But we're not talking crosswords again, so don't worry. I just busted out in sweat.
You got a flop sweat happening.

There were 75,000 rated Scrabble tournament games in 2004.

And that number by 2019 was cut almost in half.

That went down to 40,000.

And the Nationals went from 837 players to 280 over that same span.

So it just seems like that documentary really caused a resurgence, I guess. And then it kind of went back to level set maybe.
Yeah, for sure. There was also a lot of internal strife to the North American Scrabble Players Association didn't make a lot of friends.
They established a real top down hierarchy of how that association was run. So some other players associations were developed, splintered off.
There was a lot of fracture, I guess, in the Scrabble community that just kind of came around that time that surely affected attracting new people. Like, I hate to use the word toxic because I feel like it's definitely overused.
Yeah. But it feels like that community got a lot more toxic around that time.
And, you know, that doesn't exactly attract people like, hey, I want to join that toxic subculture. Right.
Really mix it up. Yeah.
Well, some people are into that. Yeah.
Those aren't the people you want to attract to your toxic subculture, though. Yeah.
Or play Scrabble with. Right.
If you're in a tournament, you're going to see some big scores. They have scores over 800 points at times in tournaments.
The highest scoring legal word, I don't think it's ever been played officially, but that would be a 1,784 point score if that was across three different triple word scores. And that word is oxyfenbutazone.
Yeah, it's a now banned NSAID pain reliever. That's right.
And since I know you looked it up because I did too, I'll let you give the definition of kazik, which is the highest score ever for a word played in a tournament. 392 points for Kazik.
So yeah, so that one, from what I could tell, I found that as a Spanish word for an indigenous chieftain, usually among Caribbean tribes. Yeah, I saw that the Taino people like the indigenous Bahamians.
Right. And that was actually played.
Amazing. Yeah, I mean, so that's one word for 392 points.
To put that into perspective, a good, you know, average person's Scrabble score, from what I can tell, a couple to a few hundred points. This is like a Scrabble score with just a high Scrabble score

with just one word.

This is like the level

that these people are playing at.

And Chuck, I say we take another break

and we'll come back

and we'll poke around in the brains

of those high-level Scrabble players

and see what neurologists

have found out recently.

Let's do it. Want to learn about a pterosaur and call it pterodactyl? How to take a perfect movement all about fractals.
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Yeah. Take it away.
Well, one of the studies, I can't remember what year it was. I actually failed to look now that I think about it.
They found that when you put a Scrabble player through what's called the lexical decision task, which is showing people very quickly jumbles of words and saying, is there a word in there? Too late. Is there a word in here? Too late.
And they have to answer really quick. And there's always some lab assistant shouting too late and really just mix things up a little bit.
Scrabble players use regions of their brains that most people wouldn't use. And they don't use regions of their brains that people normally do use.
So like when you think of a word, you think of the meaning usually. That's how you grasp a word and you're really kind of processing what the word is.
There's a meaning attached to it. There's a symbolism attached to it.
With the Scrabble player, they do not think like that.

They think of words as physical constructs of letters. Meanings aren't attached to them.
That takes too long. They process them much more quickly because it's just a bunch of letters that you put together.
It doesn't matter what it means. It just matters that you can get this number of points on a Scrabble board.
One of the other things they found is that they also use more spatial reasoning than the average person does when they're recognizing and processing words and letters because they have to figure out how to orient them on the board and how they would intersect with other words on the board. So their brains change, and the way they approach words change the more scrabble you play.
Yeah, I think it's almost like Tetris-like in their brains at a certain point. Like, they might as well just be Tetris blocks that are trying to fit in, obviously not Tetris, because you can't make, you know, your own size and shaped things, but you know what I mean? Sure.
I know what you mean. I think it's a good analogy.
There's some other cool studies that there are, you know, kind of findings they found from different studies. The setup of this one is basically that if you have a college degree, they have found that you're less likely than those without, you know, less education to get age-related memory loss and Alzheimer's.
but in terms of Scrabble, they found that that gap can be closed a lot. If you don't have that college degree and you play a lot of Scrabble, you can close that gap to where it's almost the same as people with higher levels of education as far as acquiring that memory loss in Alzheimer's.
Pretty great. Take that, college boy.
What about the Ruskies? That was interesting too, I thought. Yeah, they studied Russian engineering students.
And by they, I mean the people who conducted this study. And they said, here, Russian engineering students, we're going to teach you Scrabble, and you're going to play it for a year, and then we're going to test you.
We're going to have you play teachers who teach English as a foreign language. So they're Russian, but they know a lot of English.

And we're going to play the English language Scrabble, by the way.

So there's all the pieces on the board right there.

And what they found is that the engineering students,

who didn't speak that much English,

were able to, I think in the words of the study,

smoke the English as a foreign language teachers in Scrabble.

That's incredible.

Yeah, even though the teachers knew more English than the engineering students did. Yeah, that's super cool.
They've also found that for tournament play, men dominate tournament Scrabble tournaments, generally speaking. But they've done studies of this, and they're like, hey, it's not because men have big brains and women have little

tiny brains. It's not because guys can learn words better than women.
It has nothing to do

with any of that. It has to do with the fact that in general, overall, men start younger than women

do. Boys, I guess, start younger than girls when it comes to Scrabble.
And women generally and

girls play more Scrabble, but they say that's not necessarily how to get better at Scrabble. They're playing for fun and just having a good time.
Whereas to get better at Scrabble, what these boys and men seem to be doing more of is like anagramming stuff and analyzing everything. And instead of just like, hey, let's just play some Scrabble and have some fun.
Like, let me research and analyze this stuff so I can dominate in a tournament. Exactly.
But I mean, that's how you get better at it. Apparently, anagramming is a huge thing to do if you want to get better at Scrabble.
Because when you look at the, you know, there's seven tiles on your tile holder. It's just a jumble of letters.
And you have to find the words in those letters. That's part of the game.
So if you go practice that, yeah, you're going to get a lot better. But I saw that among just the population in general, just people who play Scrabble for fun, it's much more closely divided.
It's more like 60-40 men to women. Yeah.
Yeah, and I think it's changed a lot over the past couple of decades, too. Yeah, I think that documentary probably helped quite a bit.
Yeah. When it comes to, like, all right, what words, like, what dictionary do you use? There is a Scrabble dictionary.
It's called the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. It was released in 1978, again, by Selchow and Ryder, even though they worked with Merriam-Webster to produce the game because, you know, they're dictionary people.
And this has caused a lot of controversy over the years because words have been added, words have been taken away. And every time that happens, the Scrabble community, you know, some people are like, great, great change.
And some people are like, no, I hate that. Yeah, because to them, they're just words.
The meaning has no purpose or point whatsoever in the game. It doesn't matter.
So why would you take any words out that we could potentially use and score with? Some of the worst and the worst racial slurs out there have been in the Scrabble Dictionary. Yeah.
Do you want to tell some people? Well, I mean, I'm not going to say those,

but there is a list. I think there was a woman named Judith Grad in the 90s who kind of

got on her, I don't want to say got on her soapbox because that indicates a bad thing. She

got a campaign going to have the slurs removed. The anti-defamation league got involved.
Hasbro

eventually said, all right, we're going to remove, uh, these words from the next edition of the dictionary. Uh, booby, gringo, farted, honky, whiteys, pissed, fatso, redneck, and wazoo.

And Jerry, uh, best of luck beeping all those out.

This should be pretty easy.

So, uh, yeah. So there were a lot of Scrabble players who were like, this is outrageous.
Who cares about offensiveness? And other people are like, this is kind of society evolving in real time right here. So I guess Hasbro made a compromise and they said, well, how about this? For tournament level, we'll keep the original, we won't take these words out.
We'll have a separate book called The Official Word List. Among players, it's called TWL 98.
That's when it came out. It was 1998.
But for everybody else, and by the way, the TWL 98 is just available to Players Association members. So it's not like available to the general public.

And then the other one, the toned down version,

that's the one that the public will be able to get their hands on.

Yeah, and that was in the early 2000s.

And then in 2020, the official tournament removed a lot of those slurs

that they previously allowed for tournament play.

Right.

And I also mentioned, you know, adding words.

Over the past few years, they've added hundreds of words.

Jedi, subtweet, vax have been added.

Birria, as in birria tacos, has been added.

Oh, and I discovered a new dish from this two-chook, cockhumber.

Usually spelled with a K, but apparently it's also okay to spell with a C. It's an Indian dish featuring cucumbers.
It's like a fresh tomato cucumber salad. And actually, I should correct myself.
I think it could be Indian, but it's also possibly like Anatolian. I'm not 100% sure, but it sounds delicious.
I'll send you the recipe. All right, do it.
They also add slang from time to time.

Apparently, Ima.

I-M-M-A.

As in I'm going to.

Like I'm about to do something.

Right.

You can play that.

Yeah, you could.

You could also play yeet.

What is that?

I don't know, man.

Okay.

You know, I really feel like I've outed myself in the last couple episodes.

Skibbity toilet buddy. Not the edgelord that people assume that I am.
Edgelord. There has been some cheating over the years.
We'll talk about a couple of these incidents. In 2011, there was a World Scrabble Championship between a Thai player named Cholopat E.T.R.E.
and a British guy named Ed Martin because it was a missing G tile. And there's a lot of versions of this story.
Apparently, Time Magazine and some Scrabble websites say that E.T.R.E. called for Martin to be searched for that G.
And the tournament officials were like, no, we're not going to do that. We don't want to say that.

In Mental Floss, they said that, you know,

they asked them to turn their pockets inside out,

and that eventually just escalated to like, hey, maybe they hit it in their pants.

They should be stripped searched.

Maybe it's in their chode.

Yeah.

That's why you strip search.

Yeah.

Is that in the Scrabble dictionary?

There's no way that it's not.

As a matter of fact, you keep talking, you tell the story, and I'm going to look it up. And then what they eventually found out was that the missing G was in the pocket of another player from a previous game.
And what I want to know is, like, who's running these tournaments? Like, how are you not counting the letters before the game or cracking open a brand-new factory-sealed Scrabble? Like, you've got to count those letters. You've got to make sure that's like playing chess without, like, a pawn and just being like, oh, it looks good to me.
Yeah, it's nuts. It's also nuts just how many players do cheat in, like, high-level tournaments.
Like that kid? Yeah, there was a kid. He was 13, so he's unnamed as far as I can tell.
He's of age now. We should find him out and dox him.
He was playing down in Orlando at the Scrabble Nationals in 2012, and he got caught palming blank tiles. What a jerk.
I don't know that we even mentioned what blank tiles are good for, but they can stand. They're like a wild card.
They stand in for any letter that you want. So they can really come in handy when you have like a bunch of letters, but you just can't quite connect them.
That blank tile comes in there and you say, thanks, blank tile. So if you have that, you have a huge advantage.
So finally, this kid was caught cheating. But this was on the heels of a year before when he won the $2,000 prize for winning.
Even though apparently statistically the percentage of blank tiles that he came up with across the game or the games that he played throughout that tournament where it just doesn't add up. But they let that win stand.
But for 2012, he got booted. Yeah, they should have made that kid pay that money back with interest.
Yeah, they should have. What else? They had their own little Me Too incident at one point, too, didn't they? Yeah, there's, I don't want to say well-regarded, a well named sam contamathi and he is not just a player he also has a side business of like custom equipment like holders timers is another one because in tournaments they use timers like chess so he's got his whole line he's like really really integral to the current like Scrabble world, tournament world.
And for a long time, especially before Me Too came along, he just got away with it. Like the Players Association president would make a point of escorting women who went up to Canamathy's hotel room to pick up equipment that they bought from her or were buying from him.
Like you just didn't go alone. Like it was an open secret.
And then finally, like he just groped the wrong woman. Me too came along and I think at least 15 named women came forward and put their story on the record about him.
And the response from the Players Association was essentially like, okay, but don't do it again. And he had already been banned for cheating.
He palmed tiles too. He was a national champion.
He palmed tiles too. He got suspended for four years for cheating, but for the allegations of sexual misconduct, nothing, just a warning, essentially.
So that really ticked off a lot of people, especially high-level women players, too, who were like, you know what? We hold our own tournaments, and he's not invited any longer. So he's kind of been ostracized, but I have the impression that he's still very much around.
Still making those custom racks. Yeah, from what I can tell.

By the way, live update,

we did text John Hodgman just to find out.

I was kind of curious about a couple of things

and about his highest Scrabble total ever

and if he and Catherine have a running record between them.

And he says,

we have old notebooks full of score sheets,

but we never go back and look at them because as we know, Johnodgeman only looks forward time does not go backward no nostalgia is a toxic impulse according that's right we were both consistently in the 300 to 350 pretty good mode okay that's that sounds high to me yeah same here he said that's good enough to make me happy he we have both probably broken 400 a couple of times. I remember words better than scores.
25 years ago, I added S-T-E-R to joke to make jokester on a triple word square while playing with some friends of my parents. And I don't remember the points, but I was really proud of myself.
I'll bet every once in a while you can peek in on Hodgman sleeping, and he's got a big smile on his face because he's dreaming about that. I love it.
I have a live update as well. Chode is not in the Scrabble.
Oh, really? Allowable word. Oh, man.
This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the show. Live updates.
Yeah, and Scrabble being the arbiter of what words we can and can't use now. Exactly.

So Scrabble, of course, has popped up in pop culture here or there.

Rosemary's Baby, very famously used, Mia Farrow used, well, Rosemary,

uses Scrabble, a bunch of Scrabble tiles to try to figure out that some suspected witches were actually witches by using the tiles to figure out anagrams.

Yeah. Same with sneakers.
I couldn't find that. I saw that movie.
I never saw the movie. I couldn't find the clip with the Scrabble.
I just saw mention of it in a couple of places. I don't remember Scrabble.
It was a long time ago. I love this one.
Frank. Oh, Frank, the chairman of the board, Mr.
Sinatra, in his version of The Twelve Days of Christmas added, nine games of Scrabble. Yeah, that's right.
Which is actually Joe Piscopo doing Frank. Which, that's all you need to do.
That's better than Frank, I think. And then Seinfeld and Calvin and Hobbes both kind of famously had Scrabble, made up high-value Scrabble words in their shows in the first season of Seinfeld.
I don't remember. Who was it? Do you know? Seinfeld's mom played Kwon, Q-U-O-N-E.
And like Seinfeld calls her out on it and it's not actually a word, but Kramer's like, yeah, Kwon, whatever. But the biggest thing that stood out to me in this scene, I watched it today, it had the original dad who just did not work.
Yeah, and then they brought in, I can't remember his name, but he was the dad in Arthur. Oh, was he the dad in Arthur? He was Liza Minnelli's father in Arthur, yeah.
He was Morty Seinfeld. Yeah, totally.
His first name's Barney, I think. God, I used to know his name because Arthur's, you know, one of my top ever comedies.
And then Calvin and Hobbes, I think Calvin played ZQFMGB and said it was a type of worms from New Guinea. Oh, that's funny.
And then lastly, Chuck, we can't

forget, Scrabble led to

Trivial Pursuit being

created, because remember they

went and got a new Scrabble board, and

we're like, how many Scrabble boards have we bought over the

years? We should make our own game.

That's right. And that's it.

Scrabble has not appeared in any

other part of pop culture except for those things.

That's right. You got anything else? No, sir.
All right. Well, that's Scrabble, everybody.
Thank you for finally doing it, Chuck. And since I thank Chuck for finally relenting and giving in on doing an episode I've wanted to do for years and years and years, it's time for Listener Man.
Oh, you. Hi, guys.
Or basically just the voices that live in my head permanently because I listen to you two all the time. Nice.
A while back, I have no idea where the idea came from. I wonder whether everyone sees concepts the same way in their head as I do and started asking around because she's referencing, like, the inner dialogue app where people don't hear words, they see images.
And Daisy says this, and this is very interesting, I think. I noticed that for me, the calendar months of the year in my brain are arranged like this.
January, February, March, April, May, June, July, December, November, October, August. Wow.
On the line below, it's very important the way it's spaced out, I think. Uh, and it's not, it's also indented.
So December, November, October, August is on the line below and dented and dented to about, uh, mid February. Uh, so going from left to right and then making a curve to continue from right to left.
No need to point out how weird this is guys, because no calendar calendar ever was drawn this way. However, this is how it is normal for me in my head.
You can imagine the weird faces I got when asking this question enthusiastically to find out about other people's head calendars, especially when I told them about mine. Anyway, all this to ask, when you picture a yearly calendar in your head, what does it look like? Immediately when I read that, the only thing that popped into my head was a, like the back of a, like a wall calendar you would get as a teenager where it had all of them listed.
That's what I picture. Oh, nice.
So what are the, what are the monthly centerfolds? I don't know, but I I guess it would just be four, four, and four.

Okay.

That's how I picture it in my head.

January, February, March, April, and then four more, then four more.

In order, because I'm not weird.

I don't know.

I'm trying to come up with it now,

and I don't really think I keep a calendar in my head.

I'm just too, like, in the present, you know?

Like, in the now.

Yeah, baby.

Sorry to let you down. Who is that? That is Daisy and Daisy is from Belgium.
Thanks, Daisy. That's the problem.
She's from Belgium. There's your problem.
Thanks a lot, Daisy. That was wonderful.
I feel like also that somebody can make a t-shirt of like the visual representation of the calendar in Daisy's head. And it would be the most arcane, deep cut Stuff You Should Know t-shirt of all time.
Totally. Yeah.
So if you want to get in touch with us like Daisy did and share your mental whatever, we would love that. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app.
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