Happy New Year and hopefully you had a great Christmas too!

 

Here is a quiz based on the New Year (EIGHTEEN).

 

How many 5 letter words or more can you make from the letters in EIGHTEEN ?

 

There are 23 words in all and many are quite hard... so...

 

If you only get 5...its cold turkey, 6-10 prosecco, 11-15 fireworks, 16+ champagne! 

 

 

 

spoiler

 

 

 

 

spoiler

 

 

 

 

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spoiler

 

 

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EHING
EIGHT 
EIGHTEEN
EIGNE
ETHENE
ETHNE
GENET
GENIE
HENGE
HETING
HINGE
NEIGH
NIGHT
TEEING
TEENE
TENGE
THEEING
THEGN
THEIN 
THEINE
THINE
THING
TINGE

 

 

 

Have a great 2018! 

A balanced rack in Scrabble is one which generally contains 7 different letters, and a reasonable spread of vowels and consonants.

A typical problem rack is one that contains two many Is. If you have two Is on your rack I would advocate trying to play one of the Is off on the next move if possible.

 

However there are many 4 letter words that contain 2 Is. These words are a great way of getting rid of lots of Is at the same time... result!

There are 36 four letter words containing 2 Is :

 

2 of them start and end with an I

9 of them start with an I and have a third letter as an I

25 of them have one I in position 2 and one in position 4. Two such words, TITI and TIKI, were challenged last Thursday. What are the other 23 ?

 

Answers below:

BIDI                     

DIVI   DIXI

FINI

HILI  HIOI

KIWI

LIRI

MIDI  MIHI MINI MIRI

NIDI NISI

PIKI  PILI PIPI

SIMI  SIRI

TIPI   (+TIKI & TITI)

WIKI  WILI

 

ZITI

The Arabic alphabet is the third of our alphabet series, and is the least kind to Scrabble players. 

 

Many of the words are not allowed in Scrabble, and those that are have other, more everyday meanings.

 

Here is the alphabet - those marked with an * are NOT allowed in Scrabble.

 

'Alif    * (because of the apostrophe)  (but ALIF is acceptable)

Ba

Ta

Tha   *

Jim    *

Ha

Kha    *

Dal

Dhal

Ra      *

Zain    *

Sin

Shin

Sad

Dad

Ta

Za

'Ain      * (because of the apostrophe)  (but AIN is acceptable)

Ghain    *

Fa

Qaf       *

Kaf

Lam    

Mim

Nun

Ha

Waw

 

Ya

The second set in our alphabet series is the letters of the Greek Alphabet.

Many of these letters appear in scientific terms so should be well known to mathematicians and physicists !

 

ALL words listed below are valid in Scrabble.

Alpha 

Beta

Gamma

Delta

Epsilon

Zeta

Eta

Theta

Iota

Kappa

Lambda

Mu

Nu

Xi

Omicron

Pi

Rho

Sigma

Tau

Upsilon

Phi

Chi

Psi

 

Omega

Earlier this year we published a series of articles showing different ways to learn words.

 

Another method is to take a discrete set of words and learn them. This month we will publish 4 discrete alphabet sets for you to learn.

Many of the 'letters' are fairly well known, but there may be a gem or two for you to unearth! In future we will study the Hebrew, Arabic and Greek alphabets.

 

Firstly the NATO phonetic alphabet. 

Here all the words represent a letter from the English language. A couple of the letters have variant spellings this is to help non-English speakers pronounce the word correctly. (For example, the French would typically pronounce 'Juliet' as "Julie-AY" but will pronounce the final 't' sound when a second 't' is added to the end of the word)

Unless otherwise stated ALL words listed below are valid in Scrabble.

Alpha or Alfa 

Bravo

Charlie

Delta

Echo

Foxtrot

Golf

Hotel

India

Juliet or Juliett (JULIET is valid, JULIETT is not)

Kilo

Lima

Mike

November

Oscar

Papa

Quebec

Romeo

Sierra

Tango

Uniform

Victor

Whiskey

X-ray or Xray  (XRAY is valid, X-RAY is not)

Yankee

 

Zulu