Scrabble Word Solver - Scrabble Teacher

The official scrabble rules are as follows:

One player is elected as scorekeeper. They may also take part in the game. The scorekeeper keeps tally of each player’s score, entering it after each player’s turn.

To Begin Playing:

All the tiles are placed in the bag. Each player takes a tile out to find out who players first. The player who has the tile nearest the beginning of the alphabet, with the ‘blank’ preceding ‘A’, plays first. The exposed tiles are put back into the bag and the bag is shaken to shuffle them.

Each player, in turn, then draws seven new tiles and places them on their rack without disclosing them to their opponents.

Play continues clockwise and on each subsequent turn, players then have the choice of exchanging tiles, passing, or placing a word on the board.

Exchanging Tiles:

Any player may use their turn to replace any or all of the tiles on their rack. They do so by discarding them face down, drawing the same number of new tiles, then mixing the discarded tiles with those remaining in the bag. They then wait for their next turn to play.

Passing (Missing a Turn):

Instead of placing tiles on the board, or exchanging tiles, a player may also decide to pass, whether or not they are able to make a word (or words). However, should all players pass twice in succession, the game ends.

Placing the First Word:
The first player combines two or more of the tiles to form a word and places them on the board to read either across or down with one tile on the centre square (star). Diagonal words are not permitted.

All tiles played in this and subsequent turns must be placed in one continuous line horizontally or vertically.

Permitted Words:
Any words listed in a standard English dictionary are permitted with the following exceptions;

-Words spelt with an initial capital letter.

-Abbreviations

-Prefixes

-Suffixes

-Words requiring an Apostrophe

-Words requiring a hyphen

Foreign words in a standard English dictionary are considered to have been absorbed into the English language and are allowed.

Challenging Words:
Once a word has been played, the word may be challenged before the score is added up and the next player starts their turn. At this point only, you may consult a dictionary to check spelling or usage. If the word challenged is unacceptable, the player takes back their tiles and loses their turn.

Scoring the First Word:
A player completes their turn by counting and announcing their score, which is recorded by the scorekeeper. The score for the turn is calculated by adding up all the values of the numbers on the tiles, plus the premium values resulting from placing tiles on premium squares.

Ending a Turn:
At the end of every turn, the player draws as many new tiles they have played, thus always keeping seven tiles on their rack.

Adding 50 Point Bonus:
Any player who plays all seven of their tiles in a single turn scores a premium of 50 points in addition to their regular score for the turn. The 50 points are added on after doubling or tripling a word score.

Next Players Turn:
The second player and then each player in turn, has the choice of exchanging tiles, passing or adding one or more tiles to those already played so as to form new words of two or more letters.

All tiles played in any one turn must be placed in one row only across, or one column only down the board.

If they touch other tiles in adjacent rows, they must form complete words cross-word fashion, with all such tiles.

The player gets full score for all words formed or modified by their play. They include the bonus scores of any premium squares on which they have placed the tiles.

There are five ways that new words can be formed:

1) Adding one or more tiles to the beginning or end of a word already on the board, or to both the beginning and end of that word.

2) Placing a word at right angles to a word already on the board. The new word must use one of the letters of the word already on the board.

3) Placing a complete word parallel to a word already played so that adjoining tiles also form complete words.

4) The new word may also add a letter to an existing word.

5) The last variations would be to ‘bridge’ two or more letters. (This can only happen on the 4th move or later in the game.)

Sometimes a word may cross two premium word squares. The word score is doubled then redoubled – 4 times the complete word score; or trebled and then re-trebled – 9 times the complete word score!

Winning Scrabble
The game ends when all the tiles have been drawn and one of the players has used all the tiles in their rack. The game also ends when all possible plays have been made or all players passed twice in consecutive turns.

After all the scores are added up, each player’s score is reduced by the sum of their unplayed tiles, and if one player has used all their tiles, their score is increased by the some of the unplayed tiles of all the other players.

Remember – the game can be won or lost on the last letter in the bag!

Clarification of Commonly Misunderstood Rules
1) If any tile touches another tile in adjacent rows, it must form part of a complete word crossword fashion, with All such tiles.

2) A word can be extended on both ends within the same move.

3) It is not permissible to add tiles to various words, or form new words in different parts of the board in the same turn.

4) The bonus scores of the premium squares only apply to the turn in which the tiles are placed on them.

5) When more than one word is formed in a single turn, each word is scored. The common letters are counted (with full premium value, when they are on premium squares) in the score for each word.

6) If a word crosses two premium word squares the word is doubled and re-doubled – 4 times the complete word score: or trebled and re-trebled – 9 times the complete word score.

7) When one player has used all their tiles and the pool is empty, the game ends. Even if other players are able to go, they cant, the game has ended! No more moves may be made.

8) In some games no player succeeds in using all their tiles. In this case the game continues until all possible moves have been made. If a player is unable to move, they pass their turn. If all players pass twice, in consecutive turns, the game ends.

9) A dictionary or word guide may NOT be used while a game is in progress to search for words to fit the tiles on your rack. It may only be consulted after a word has been played and challenged.

10) The same word CAN be played more than once in a game.

11) Pluralised words ARE allowed.

Scrabble – subject of fiercely fought national tournaments in the UK, US, and Australia, arouser of vocabulist passion, and inspiration of literary comment. Who would have thought that it started out as the unpublished game called Lexico, the brainchild of an out-of-work Connecticut architect in the Depression year of 1931.

A study of the games market led Alfred Butts to pick on words as the basis of a new development. Lexico itself was not unlike its near-namesake Lexicon, in that the equipment consisted simply of tiles with letters, but no board. Following a procedure akin to Rummy, a fad card game of the time, the winner was the first to complete a seven-letter word and lay it face up on the table. For variety, Butts later accorded point-values to the letters, and when one player went out the others could subsequently score for making words of four or more letters. He offered it in this form to several manufacturers, but without success.

Architect Butts naturally went back to the drawing board, and duly came up with the idea of adding a board to the equipment and playing tiles to it in the manner of crosswords, which had then only recently become a craze. Now renamed ‘It’, the game was offered again to the manufacturers, and again turned down as being ‘too intellectual’, no doubt on the popular but conveniently unprovable business theory that ‘No one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the public’. The new title may not have helped matters. ‘It’ had been coined by romantic writer Elinor Glyn in the previous decade as a synonym for sex, especially as embodied in silent film star Clara Bow. The game was evidently not as sexy as it sounded – which is perhaps ironic, in view of today’s use of ‘playing Scrabble’ as a phrase rich in euphemistic suggestiveness.

In 1939 Butts was introduced by a mutual friend to James Brunot, who had been looking for a suitable business to develop away from the city lights and rat-race. Brunot liked the look of what was now called Criss-Cross Words, and started experimenting with it himself. War intervened to hold this up, and by 1942 Butts and his wife were making up game sets and marketing them through one Chester Ives, a bookshop owner in Danbury, Connecticut, who undertook the manufacture of the boards. This came to nothing, or nothing to write home about, and for a while it seemed as if Butts’s brainchild would remain forever the Peter Pan of the games world.

In 1947, however, James Brunot re-entered the picture by returning from Washington, where he had been the wartime executive director of the President’s War Relief and Control Board. Brunot had made one or two changes to the game, including the rule about starting across the middle instead of in the top left corner, and, perhaps more inspirationally, changing the name to Scrabble. No particular significance attached to the word: it just happened to be one of several nice-sounding possibilities that research showed had not already been registered as a trade name. (But would the game have been so successful had it been published, as it nearly was, under the title Logo-Loco?) Under a new arrangement between the two, Brunot would manufacture and market the newly named game through his business facility, the Production and Marketing Company.

In the three years from 1949 to 1951 sales of Scrabble remained at the disappointingly low level of under 10,000 per annum. It was only in 1952, when Jack Strauss played and enjoyed it on holiday, that the game found the break it had been looking for. Strauss was surprised on returning to work to learn that Scrabble was not on sale at New York City’s famous department store, Macy’s. Once there, everybody who was anybody started buying it. The game caught on and became a national craze. Within two years, Brunot’s company had sold over four million sets.

Shortly after, Brunot sold to Selchow and Righter (who had long ago rejected Criss-Cross Words) the rights to the manufacture of the standard set, retaining for himself those for non-standard and speciality editions. He kept these until 1971, eventually selling out his entire interest to Selchow and Righter. Scrabble was introduced to Australia in 1953, being published there by T. R. Urban, and in 1954 to the UK through J. W. Spear and Son, who continue to market and promote the game.

In 1971 Scrabble achieved the status of national tournament play through the enthusiasm of games fanatic Gyles Brandreth. Brandreth had been struck by the popularity of the game in British prisons, on which he was then writing a book. Intrigued by its tournament possibilities, he put an advertisement in The Timesnewspaper to assess possible support. The response was overwhelming, and, with the ready co-operation of Spears Games, the British National Scrabble Championships have become an annual event attracting thousands of competitors.