to the common AEIOU and LNRST letters to look for bonus words, you could use a B to make:
ATEBRIN an anti-malarial drug
BANTIES bantams
BASINET mediaeval helmet
BESAINT to make into a saint
BESTAIN
BAITERS people who use bait
BARITES plural of barite, a mineral
REBAITS
TERBIAS plural of terbia, a white powder
BANISTER
SEABLITE plant of the goosefoot family
INSTABLE
BARONIES lands owned by a baron
SEAROBIN an American fish
With well over 5,000 to choose from, getting a grip on the four-letter words is quite a job. Once again, you can make your life easier by concentrating on the most useful ones; they are the words with excess vowels or excess consonants, words that use J, Q, X and Z, and words that help you get rid of awkward letter combinations.
The most memorable of the four-letter words (though conversely, one you can easily misspell) is EUOI. It is one of various ways to spell “an expression of Bacchic frenzy”. (None of the other ways of spelling it is an all-vowel word.) As Bacchus was the Roman god of wine, what we are basically saying here is it’s what Romans shouted when they were drunk.
Knowing this meaning, you could form a little phrase to remember the tricky spelling. Try:
Excessive Units Of Intoxication
Not only do you remember how to spell the word, you now have an idea what to do when you’re finished playing Scrabble.
But there’s, perhaps sadly, more to life than Bacchic frenzy. There are quite a few fours with three vowels – in fact, every consonant except F and Y is part of at least one three-vowel four. Here is one for every possible combination of three different vowels:
AEI gives IDEA
AEO gives ODEA
AEU gives BEAU
AIO gives IOTA
AIU gives AITU
AOU gives AUTO
EIO gives ONIE
EIU gives LIEU
EOU gives ROUE
IOU – none – except that cry of Bacchic frenzy EUOI
Again, you can see there are a few familiar ones mixed in with some exotica. ODEA, for instance, were Greek or Roman buildings for entertainment, the plural of odeum or the more familiar odeon. An AITU is a half-human, half-divine being, like some of the incredibly good players I try to beat on the tournament Scrabble circuit. A ROUE is a man given to immoral living (some of them on the circuit too), while, more prosaically, ONIE is a Scots version of any.
There are a few four-letter words with no vowels, not even a Y:
BRRR, GRRL, PFFT, PSST
You know three of those, even if you have never thought of them as words in a Scrabble context – BRRR is what you say when you’re cold, PSST is for surreptitiously attracting someone’s attention, and PFFT is one of those words that everyone knows but is rather hard to define – a sound to indicate deflating, diminishing or disappearing. A GRRL is a young woman who enjoys aggressively feminist rock music, just the type you are likely to meet at your local Scrabble club.
Incidentally both BRRR and GRRL can have either two or three Rs – BRR, BRRR, GRRL and GRRRL, depending, presumably, on exactly how cold you are and exactly how aggressive the girl is.
The C can be a very useful letter to have. It combines well with other high-scoring letters H and K to give you the chance of a high score for just a four- or five-letter word. If you can play something like CHUNK or FLICK, with the K on a triple-letter square and the whole thing on a double-word square, you score 48 for that alone.
One drawback is the lack of those ever useful two-letter words: C only appears in one, the odd-looking CH, an obsolete South West of England pronoun meaning ‘I’.
High-scoring three- and four-letter words with a C include:
CAZ casual
COZ old form of cousin
COZE to chat
COX
COXA the hipbone
BACH to live the life of a bachelor
CHIB a knife; to stab with a knife
CHIV same as CHIB
CHAV (derogatory) working-class person who wears casual sports clothes
ZACK an Australian five-cent coin
EXEC an executive
Another drawback of the C is that it is not a hugely productive source of prefixes and suffixes, with CON-, -IC, -ANCE and –ENCE being about the best.
Words which combine a C with those common one-point tiles AEIOU and LNRST include CERTAIN, CISTERN, CINEAST (a film enthusiast), CANISTER and CLARINET.
Our American friends are fond of putting CO- before a word to signify something done in partnership: COEDITOR, COWRITE, CODRIVE and so on, along with all their derivatives like COWRITER, CODRIVER and CODRIVEN. These are all valid words. Don’t concern yourself with hyphens. The Yanks rarely bother with them and if they allow the word, so do we.
Definitions of CO- words are usually quite self-explanatory. COWRITE is not a religious ceremony involving cows, a CODRIVER is not a river full of cod, and a COINMATE is not a friend who helps you count your money.
Some top-drawer Scrabble players know all the two-, three- and four-letter words. But nobody knows all the sevens. Well, maybe a tiny handful of dedicated word-study fanatics with photographic memories and lots of spare time, and even they
