10 Useful Scrabble Words

Chances are that if you like words, you’ll like Scrabble. It’s just so much fun, isn’t it? Waiting the entire game for the letter Q to come up so you can play jonquils and score 500 points, only for your opponent to get it first and play qi on a triple word square and score 501. So. Much. FUN.

Scrabble-related facts crop up on the HH Twitter feed every so often (and there’s a darn sight more where that came from in the fact book Word Drops):

In a game of Scrabble, the most productive set of letters to have is AEINRST, which can be used to spell nine different seven-letter words.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 18 May 2016

And it’s Scrabble that’s the focus of this week’s HaggardHawks YouTube video—10 indispensably useful Scrabble words, from aa to oxyphenbutazone. Good luck slipping that one into your next game...

One fiendishly useful Scrabble word that didn’t make the final cut here however is euouae. According to the Guinnes Book of Records, that’s the longest vowel-only word in the English language, and is well worth remembering if you’re looking to ditch a superfluity of vowels midway through a game. That being said, there’s some contention over whether or not euouae should actually be permissible in Scrabble play—not to mention whether or not it’s actually a word or not.

The word euouae (pronounced “you-oo-ee”) is an abbreviation used to memorize the pattern of syllables forming the cadence of a Gregorian chant known as the Gloria Patri, “Glory Be to the Father”. The Gloria Patri ends with the line, “In saecula saeculorum, Amen”, literally meaning “in a century of centuries”, or “forever and ever”. Euouae refers to the pattern of tones corresponding to the last six syllables of this line: saeculorum amen.

So strictly speaking, euouae is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase used as a mnemonic device. Does that make it a “word” in the strictest (Scrabble-playing) sense? It’s a tough call, and it’s certainly true that not every dictionary—and not every Scrabble word-list—has admitted it to its pages thus far. 

But when you’re sat in front of a rack of seven vowels, you’ve really got to take what you can get…

Eleven

A few days ago, we tweeted this:

ELEVEN literally means "one left above ten".
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) March 20, 2015

Which led to this:

@HaggardHawks I've love to see evolution of that if you have it. I've always wondered why we use eleven instead of "one-teen" or something!
— Brian Conor (@iambriam) March 20, 2015

It’s a good question—why do we say eleven and twelve, but then thirteen and fourteen? Why not oneteen and twoteen? Or threelve and fourlve?

Unsurprisingly the –teen suffix is a derivative of ten. Thirteen is literally “three and ten”, fourteen is “four and ten”, and so on. It’s a fairly ancient formation: thirteen was þreotene right back in Old English, a straightforward compound of þreo, “three”, and tene, a form of “ten”. The same goes for fourteen (derived from Old English feowertyne), and fifteen (Old English fiftene), all the way up to twenty—which was twentig, or literally “two groups of ten”.

But eleven was enleofan in Old English, which took its initial en– from the Old English word for “one”, ane. Twelve, likewise, was twelf, with its initial twe– taken from the Old English “two”, twa. The remaining –leofan and –elf parts have noting to do with the “teen” suffix, but instead represent hangovers from some ancient, pre-Old English word, probably meaning “to leave over”, or “to omit”. So eleven was literally the number “left over” after you’d counted up to ten, and twelve was literally “two left over after ten”. 

But why were eleven and twelve given different names from all the other teens? Why weren’t they just ane-tene and twa-tene?

The problem is that we’re now hardwired to think of our numbers decimally—in 10s, 100s and 1000s. There’s a good reason for doing so, of course, because 10 is such an easy number to work with. You can count to 10 using your fingers (which is called dactylonomy, by the way), and calculations involving 10 are effortlessly simple. 79 multiplied by 10, you say? 790. Easy. But this decimal way of thinking is actually a relatively recent invention, spurred on by the development of the metric system in the Middle Ages. Historically, many of our numbering and measuring systems were based around 12, not 10—and hence there are twelve inches in a foot, and two sets of twelve hours in a day. 

It’s a much more complicated number to deal with arithmetically of course (79 multiplied by 12? Give me a minute...) but there’s a very practical reason for counting in terms of 12 rather than 10—because 12 is a much more mathematically productive number. 

A set of 10, for instance, can only be split equally into two sets of five, or five sets of two. A set of 12, however, can be split into 2, 3, 4 or 6. Likewise a set of 20 can only be divided into 2, 4, 5 or 10, but a set of 24 can be divided into 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12. And even 100 has barely half the number of factors (2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50) than 144 (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 24, 36, 48, 72). 

12 homemade cookies. Soon to be 0 homemade cookies.

The fact that 12 could be so conveniently divided in so many different ways made it particularly useful, in everyday terms, in dealing with fractions, proportions, allocations, and measurements. It even led to some separate words for a set of twelve (dozen) and a set of twelve twelves (gross) entering our language—and to many ancient number systems, including the one we use today, using a base of 12, not 10. Ultimately twelve, and thereby eleven, earned names distinct from all those numbers above them, and it’s only our modern, decimal-based perspective that makes this seem strange.

Oh—948! Got there eventually... 

Eclipse

So earlier today—across the UK and much of north-western Europe, at least—this happened:

The Moon, photobombing the Sun  (The Guardian)

A solar eclipse. The first one approaching a total eclipse of the Sun in the UK for more than fifteen years. Although here at HaggardHawks HQ, while the Moon was spectacularly blocking out the Sun, the rainclouds were spectacularly blocking out the Moon. This is the UK, after all. 

But anyway. What can we tell you about eclipses?

Well, the word eclipse first appeared in English in the fourteenth century. Like pretty much every English word dating from the fourteenth century, its earliest record comes from Geoffrey Chaucer, who used it in 1374 in a translation of a work by the Roman scholar Boethius. Before then, the word was borrowed into English from French, but its earliest origins lie in its Latin and Greek equivalents, eclipsis and ekleipsis.

The initial ec– of eclipse is the Greek word ek, meaning “out” or “outside of”. It’s the same ec– as in words like eccentric (literally “outside of the centre”), ecstasy (literally “out of place”), and anecdote (literally “not given out”—or, to put it another way, “unpublished”). But it can also be found in words like appendectomy and tonsillectomy, in both of which it appears alongside the Greek word for “cut”, temnein; the surgical suffix –ectomy literally means “cut out”.

The –lipse of eclipse is leipsis, a Greek word essentially meaning “a failing”, “a leaving”, or “a shortfall”. Put these two roots together, and you’ll get the Greek verb ekleipein, which was once variously used to mean “to fail to appear”, or “to not be in your usual place”. And from there, it’s easy to see how the word came to be attached to lunar and solar eclipses. 

Although it helps that the weather is better in Greece.