MED Magazine - Issue 56 - January 2010

Feature
Lost for words? How to win at Scrabble^® with the Macmillan Dictionary
by Mairi MacDonald

If you enjoy Scrabble^® or other word games online, here’s a quick guide to using the powerful features of the Macmillan Online Dictionary (MEDO) to get one up on your opponents.

1 Get the dictionary
Simply go to http://www.macmillandictionary.com/ to access the dictionary. It’s a good idea to open the dictionary in a new browser window and adjust the size so you can see the game board and the dictionary at the same time.

2 Choose your English
Click on Options and select British English or American English from the drop down menu.

3 Play the game
Here’s a game in progress (from Facebook):

As you can see, SHOVE (in the far right column) looks like a possible candidate for our next turn; there’s a blank square so the inflection can easily be changed by adding S. But what else could we do? Simply by typing shove into the search box of the dictionary, I can see shovel, shoveled, shovelful, shoveling.

Given the tiles available, SHOVEL would be possible.

At the entry for shove itself, clicking on the Word Forms button reveals more possibilities:

SHOVES would be possible in this case, giving us 12 points. But surely there are more points to be had? Looking around the board, there’s a double word (pink) tile below the C of FENCE in the top right corner. We need a word beginning with C that has L as the fourth letter. MEDO can help here if we use a wildcard by typing in an asterisk. Entering ‘C*l’ will list all entries with the pattern C-something-L-something.

A quick scan shows that the following words are potential candidates for our grid.

The search actually returns 27 pages, but only the first 10 pages are relevant, as the others refer to idioms and multi-word phrases which aren’t allowed in Scrabble^®. Unfortunately the letters available mean that none of these suggestions are playable. Also we can’t add anything to LUX to make it a valid word, so we have to look elsewhere for our points.

Looking at the lower half of the board, typing in oye into the search box brings up oyez (meaning ‘to listen’) – this is possible using the blank tile as a Z, but would only return a measly six points.

There’s a healthy 10 points to be had if we can incorporate the Z of ZONA into the next move. Typing in zona, MEDO immediately suggests zonal. Playing the blank tile as an L earns us 13 points, one more than shovel or shoves.

Even better, there’s a valuable double word square to the left of that L. B or P can be used with L, plus a vowel. Typing in bli, Macmillan Online Dictionary suggests the following:

Blip would give us 27 points, but can we do better? Typing in pl plus a combination of the remaining letters, MEDO quickly comes up with plait and 29 points!

Note
*or beat, outshine, be more than a match for, outdo etc; click here for the full thesaurus entry.

Links
For basic and more advanced tips for Scrabble^®, click here.

Copyright © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited
This webzine is brought to you by Macmillan Education