Every Scrabble player knows the tense irritation when another player challenges their word. After all, it’s clearly not just a game; it’s an overall evaluation of the quality of your vocabulary, spelling ability, and dictionary memorization skills. And it’s much more complicated than that, too. A new article for The New Yorker by Charles Bethea, “The Battle Over Scrabble’s Dictionaries,” takes us into the wild world of tournament Scrabble, where players enter the arena like this:
Lipe strode toward the stage alongside one of the two other Americans who’d flown eight thousand miles, paying their own way, to play Scrabble in a windowless room. Jay Z’s “Empire State Of Mind” blared from the speakers and images of the Statue Of Liberty flashed on a screen beside the stage as thousands of Thai schoolchildren cheered.