In the end, the zobo and the ogive could not quite triumph over the qanat and the euripi on Sunday, and thus the contender was birsled–Scottish dialect for scorched or toasted.
It was with such linguistic acrobatics that the eighth World Scrabble Championships came to an end in a north London hotel, when Adam Logan, a 30-year-old mathematician from Canada, scored 465 points to beat Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, a 30-year-old architect from Thailand, with 426 points, in the final game of a playoff.
Over four days of triple-letter scores and usages involving q’s without u’s, like qanat, and qi, it had been a time of abstruse words, canny tactics and high tension for 102 contenders from more than 40 countries from Australia to Zambia, including the United States. It was a time, too, when language divorced itself from meaning in the competition for the $15,000 prize.
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“For the purpose of the game, the meaning of the word is not important,” said Leslie Charles, the national champion of Trinidad and Tobago, who sat in a hotel ballroom where the final best-of-five playoff was relayed on TV screens from a smaller room where the two players were closeted with their racks, tiles and 25-minute timers.
“It’s important for our own development to know the meaning,” said Charles, 61, a former teacher and accountant.
But in the game, all that counts is whether words figure on a list of the official compendium of legitimate words. (There are more than 108,553 acceptable words with up to eight characters–just for starters, according to the contest organizers.)
Indeed, the previous champion, Panupol Sujjayakorn, a 21-year-old Thai university student, was said to have won two years ago with an encyclopedic memory of the list but without a broad knowledge of spoken English.
“If it’s in the book and it has a meaning, it’s acceptable,” Charles said.
Amy Byrne, an adjudicator from Edinburgh, said euripi, Logan’s opening word, was the plural of a word meaning an arm of the sea with strong currents. Zobo, she explained to a non-Scrabbling outsider, was a form of Himalayan cattle. Ogive was an S shape used in architecture or mathematics. And qanat, she said, was an irrigation channel.
During the contest, Logan said, when he was going for one particularly high-voltage triple-letter-score, triple-word-score word, he was so tense that “my hands were shaking and it was difficult to get the letters on the board”–passions perhaps not familiar to the average player.
But then, average parlor players don’t habitually hit scores in the mid- to high hundreds: The highest recorded score in a single game is 1,049, according to organizers of the contest here.
People come to tournament Scrabble for different reasons, of course. Mark Kenas, a 52-year-old antiques dealer from Wisconsin who was among 15 listed American contestants, said he had been so angered by the outcome of the last two elections in the United States that “I had to do something about that anger, and I could immerse myself in Scrabble rather than start a revolution.”