Sowpods Scrabble Tips

Or should that be Eyrie? Well luckily there's lots of ways to spell the word for an eagle's nest in Scrabble. Especially if you are using the most up to date Collins Scrabble Words (CSW) for 2012. You can spell it: AERY AERIE AIERY AYRIE EYRIE EYRY A very handy bingo can also be made using the letters AEEIIRS: AIERIES

Here are some of the latest additions to the Scrabble canon. I look forward to finding and learning all the 3,000 additions. You can download a list of the most useful three to eight letter new Scrabble words for 2011 here . Innit? You can read a comprehensive introduction to the new list at the WESPA site . However you can't actually use them until January 2012. No harm in learning a few though. ACIDFREAK ALOO: (Hindi) a potato ALU: (Hindi) a potato ARTHOUSE: a style of film AUTOSAVE: a facility which automatically saves newly-recorded data BARCODE BIMBETTE BREDREN: brother CHAVETTE CLIT: clitoris DYKON: a celebrity, often a woman, who is much admired by lesbians FACEBOOK FANSITE FIQH: Islamic jurisprudence, an expansion of the Sharia Islamic law GAK: cocaine GOBI: cauliflower GREBO: a devotee of heavy metal or grunge music, with unkempt hair and clothes GRRL and GRRRL: as in RIOT GRRL, a young woman who plays or enjoys an aggressively feminist style of punk...

One combination of letters which seems to come up regularly for me is AEGIRST.  The only word I can usually think of is "Stagier".  After a bit more cogitation I thought of "GAITERS", but that was it. So I decided to look up the combo in "Scrabble Words" and came up with the following list: AGISTER, AIGRETS, GAITERS, SEAGIRT, STAGIER, STRIGAE, TIRAGES, TRIAGES Take a look at the list and then play a game of online hangman  (which I created just for this purpose) to see how many you can remember. OK you are unlikely to lose a life because you know which letters are in the word, but it might help you to remember them for next time! By the way, no I didn't know what most of them meant either.  But I do now :)

Lexicomania is a site for sad people obsessed with Boggle and Scrabble. Whoopee! It has a great quiz. You need to solve each page before you can move onto the next one. I'm on page 2 out of 15. How well can you do? Thanks to Al for putting this together.

Here are 155 tricky four letter words which you can test yourself on using Flash cards and other games at http://quizlet.com/_qnj3 They include words such as: MAKI (Japanese) a slice of a cold rice concoction, COWK (dial.) to retch, feel nauseated and HOHA (NZ) bored, annoyed. Enjoy.

I've found a useful site which enables you to create your own sets of flash cards - which you can play various games with, as well as using it to learn the words. The site will remember which words you get right. I've created a set with three-letter SOWPODS Scrabble words containing only consonants . There are 19 words to learn, plus their meanings, including such gems as myc, lym, wyn, tyg and many others.

Let's say you happen to pull out the most likely and fruitful handful of letters in Scrabble: AEINORT You already have a bingo: OTARINE (like or pertaining to seals) But if you add one letter you can also make the following acceptable words: A aeration B baritone, obtainer, reobtain, taborine C actioner, anoretic, creation, reaction D arointed, deration, ordinate, rationed H antihero L oriental, relation, taileron N anointer, inornate, reanoint P atropine R anterior S anoestri, arsonite, notaries, notarise, rosinate, senorita T tentoria Z notarize