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…

Hooligan

Last week, we tweeted this:

HOOLYBUSS is an old Cornish word for a noisy or confused situation.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) July 8, 2015

It’s a great word, and given its meaning it seems plausible that it should have a much more familiar etymological cousin:

@HaggardHawks Any relation to "hooligan"?

— Bookeen Team (@BookeenTeam) July 8, 2015

A nice idea—but unfortunately the two are unrelated. Hoolybuss is an old Cornish word, dating back to the eighteenth century at least, while the first hooligans didn’t emerge until the late 1890s, more than 250 miles away in Victorian London.

Like a lot of dialect words, a lack of early written evidence of hoolybuss makes it hard to pin down its exact etymology, but a reasonable guess would be that the hool– is probably a local pronunciation of hurl. This would make hoolybuss a distant cousin of hurly-burly, perhaps alongside other hool– words like hooloch (an old Scots word for a rockfall) and hooley (an old Irish-English word for a boisterous party). As for the –buss, that might come from bussa, another old Cornish word for an “empty-brained person”, but with so little evidence to go on, it really is difficult to say anything with any certainty.

So what about hooligan? Well, the OED’s earliest record of a hooligan comes from an 1898 article in The London Daily News, which condemned “the Hooligan gangs” now being “bred in these vile, miasmic byways”. By crikey, those Victorians really knew how to string a sentence together. 

As, apparently, originally the name of a gang, some etymologists have suggested that hooligan might derive from the surname of some notorious crook or dimber-damber, in which case it could be a slang corruption of “Houlihan”, or even the phrase “Hooley’s Gang”. It’s a neat theory, and certainly a plausible one—but as always with this kind of thing, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. For example, take a look at this:

That’s the front cover of an edition of a Victorian humour magazine called Nuggets, dating back to 1897. It depicts some of the magazine’s most popular recurring characters, namely a wacky family of Irish country-bumpkins called “The Hooligans”. In this edition, the Hooligans have cobbled together their own makeshift caravan (towed by their pet goat, of course) in which they intend to “travel ’round the country with ease and elegance”. Other editions saw them celebrating Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee with their own ramshackle royal procession, and trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to join the Klondike gold rush. It’s all very heavily stereotyped stuff (and would undoubtedly fall foul of the censors today) but the Victorians loved it.

They also, however, loved this:

That’s a selection of theatrical reviews—taken from an 1892 edition of The Era, an old stage newspaper—for a show at the Theatre Royal in Hull, performed by a pair of Irish comedians called Jim O’Connor and Charles Brady. The duo’s act, as a number of the reviews mention, included a hugely popular musical number about a rowdy Irish family called The Hooligans:

Oh, The Hooligans!

Always on the riot, 

Cannot keep them quiet,

Oh, The Hooligans!

They are the boys

To make a noise

In our back yard!

O’Connor and Brady’s show transferred to the Elephant and Castle Theatre in central London shortly afterward, and soon proved just as big successful there as it had been elsewhere. Their Hooligans song likewise proved a roaring success in London’s music halls—speaking of which:

Stepping even further back in time, that’s the lyric sheet to an old comic broadside called Miss Hooligan’s Christmas Cake, thought to have been published in Scotland sometime around 1880. The song recounts the fictional story of a bungling Irish cook who bakes a gigantic Christmas cake that makes everyone ill:

There was plums and prunes and cherries,

And citron and raisins and cinnamon too,

There was nutmeg, cloves and berries,

And the crust it was nailed on with glue.

There was carraway seeds in abundance,

Sure ’twould build up a fine stomachache,

’Twould kill a man twice, after eating a slice,

Of Miss Hooligan’s Christmas cake.

Again, it’s all very unfairly stereotyped, but nevertheless Miss Hooligan’s nonsense musical tale proved hugely popular at the time. As did, finally, this:

That’s the opening scene of a theatrical farce called More Blunders Than One, or The Irish Valet, written way back in 1824 by the dramatist (and former manager of London’s Adelphi Theatre) Thomas G Rodwell. And one of the characters in the play, as this extract shows, was a “Mr Larry Hoolagan”. 

So. Theatrical farces. Irish comedians. Victorian cartoons. Toxic cake. Where does all this leave us?

Well, both the play and the Scottish broadside seem to prove that hooligan is indeed derived from an Irish surname—presumably, as the OED rightly suggests, “Houlihan”. It in turn derives from the old Irish Gaelic surname O’hUallachain, the –ch– of which, in its original Irish, would have been pronounced like a softer version of the ch in Bach or loch (a voiceless velar fricative, if you want to get technical). 

That ch sound isn’t normally used in English, so it’s not too much of a leap to presume that it could morph into an easier g sound among British English speakers, which explains the early uses and spellings of the name Hooligan in both the farce and the broadside. But they have nothing to do with riotous criminal behaviour—so for that, we need to head back to the early 1890s. 

Jim O’Connor and Charles Brady apparently chose the same surname, Hooligan, for the riotous characters in their 1892 song. And when their show transferred to London the following year, its enormous success—and the success of the music hall number it incorporated—seems to have led to a whole new word for rioting, boisterous troublemakers being adopted into the street slang of the capital. 

Soon, members of London’s criminal gangs were proudly referring to themselves as Hooligans, and when they began to fall foul of the law, the name was quickly picked up and popularized by the press: an early account of a “Hooligan boy” being arrested in 1894 has since been discovered, predating the OED’s earliest evidence by four years, and aligning the word more closely with O’Connor and Brady’s arrival in London the previous year. 

So is that the end of the story? Predictably, no. Despite all this early evidence, many etymologists still adhere to the idea that hooligan derives from the name of some notorious Victorian criminal or underworld figure, with some theories even name-checking a legendary “Patrick Hooligan”, or the disgraced politician and financier ET Hooley. Just as with hoolybuss then, it seems that until more conclusive evidence comes to light, this is yet another etymological mystery that refuses to be solved. 

Oxymoron

You probably already know what an oxymoron is—a terribly good figure of speech in which two contradictory words or ideas are juxtaposed for rhetorical effect. Like Shakespeare’s “witty fool”, Chaucer’s “hateful good”, Tennyson’s “falsely true”, Hemingway’s “scalding coolness”, Milton’s “darkness visible”, or Cameron’s “True Lies”. But you were probably already unconsciously aware of that. Like an open secret. Or old news.

A light heavyweight. And some dry ice.

But you might not know that the word oxymoron itself, appropriately enough, is an oxymoron. The oxy– part (the same as in words like oxygen, paroxysm and peroxide) comes from the Greek word for “sharp” or “acrid”, oxys. The –moron part (the same as in, well, moron) comes from the Greek word for “dull”, moros. So an oxymoron is literally a “sharp-dull” turn of phrase.

There’s something fantastically oxymoronic about oxymoron being oxymoronic. But it’s certainly not alone. That Greek word moros, for instance, is also the root of sophomore, the first part of which is the Greek word for “clever” or “wise”, sophos. So a sophomore is literally a “wise-dull” person. 

Similarly, if you play the pianoforte then you’re playing the Italian words for “soft”, piano, and “loud”, forte—the name was deliberately coined because the piano was the first keyboard instrument that allowed the player to change the volume of what he or she was playing. And the preposterous meaning of preposterous comes from the fact that it combines two entirely contradictory Latin words: prae, meaning “before”, and posterus, meaning “after” or “subsequent”. So something described as preposterous is literally as absurd as something that has its “before after”.

And then there are words like bittersweet, and speechwriting. The word bridegroom literally means “bride-man”. Firewater is an old name for strong liquor. And how can you really have a ballpoint when balls don’t have points? Or be a spendthrift when thrifty people don’t spend? And how exactly can you be wholesome? Feel free to add your own oxymoronic examples to this list. 

In random order, of course.