Caroline Moorehead

Of zyzzyva and syzygy

Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy<br /> <br type="_moz" />

issue 13 September 2008

Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy

Make no mistake: Scrabble is a brutal game. Given a chance to foil an opponent, the dearest friend will turn sly and dogmatic. No surprise then to discover that in North America Scrabble is a cut-throat business, in which computer-generated word-lists, strategy and money have come to dominate the game. For Paul McCarthy, whose account of the North American circuit, Letterati, is a celebration of professional Scrabble, the ‘parlour players’ (sometimes known as ‘kitchen-table players’) who spend lazy Sunday afternoons munching snacks and debating the spelling of arcane words are just so many dinosaurs.

In 1938 an unemployed architect from New York called Alfred Butts had the idea of combining his two passions, anagrams and crossword puzzles. Using the front page of the New York Times, he calculated the number of letters needed to make up a board.

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