Scrabblegrams — Never Be Bored at the Board
As the tournament SCRABBLE community grapples with its official word list, Eric Chaikin — producer/director of 2004’s Emmy-nominated documentary “Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the SCRABBLE Circuit” — goes on a more light-hearted quest for the GOAT — the Greatest Scrabblegram of All Time…
Do you brag of expertise at eighties quizzes? Alan Hunter and Nina Blackwood were original MTV VJs. Identify a couple more.
The trivia challenge above should not be too tough for those ‘of a certain age’. Did you get Mark Goodman, J.J. Jackson, and Martha Quinn? Of course you did. On second glance, do you notice anything strange about it? Take your time — we’ll wait. As you may have suspected, the gold we seek lies not in the trivium, but in the letters themselves.
First, you might notice that all letters of the alphabet appear at least once in that paragraph, even the rare J Q X Z — and if you were to count, you would find exactly 100 letters. Got it now? As you may deduce, the teaser is made precisely from the 100 tiles in a standard English Scrabble set (with the blanks as N and Z), making what we call a Scrabblegram.
The Scrabblegram challenge has a rich history, which we will traverse in our quest to find the GOAT: The Greatest Scrabblegram of All Time.
Creativity Meets Constraint
If you’re looking for something more creative than competitive this quarantine season, why not dump out those familiar wooden tiles and try one? It’s easy to start: first, check your tile distribution (match the letter counts on the game box), then start making words. What to make is up to you: pithy saying, newspaper headline, maybe a poem… if you dare.
But as in the Scrabble game itself “rack balance” and awareness of the remaining “tile pool” are critical. Plan ahead, or you could run out of key letters — there are only 2 H’s for example, and a lot of shorter words that use them (the, she, who, what, where, with…). On the other side, if you don’t decide early where to use not just the 4 “singleton” tiles (J Q X Z) but other high-pointers like V, W, and F — you’ll be stuck with them later on. And as in the real game: don’t waste your blanks.
You may want to start with a theme that uses tricky letters — “Sancho Panza said to Don Quixote, ‘Jefe…’” for example— but resourcefulness will be needed to bring it home in high-quality fashion.
For this reason, Scrabblegrams are a good illustration of the formula for great wordplay:
Elegance x Topicality x Difficulty of Constraint
The best examples read fluidly, have a high density of thematic information with few extraneous parts, and are more impressive the more difficult the constraint of the exercise becomes. Writing good Scrabblegrams is “Hard,” but not nearly as hard as writing “perfect pangrams” (each letter only once), or palindromes (same backwards and forwards) — those are “Very Hard.”
But which among them can claim GOAT status? Read on.
Origins
The challenge was first publicly issued in The Times of London on March 11, 1975, when the Diary section expressed a fear that a “new game” invented by Phoebe Winch of Sherborne might prove compulsive. They were right. Hers was the first published Scrabblegram:
I am dieting. I eat quince jelly. Lots of ground maize gives variety. I cook rhubarb and soda, weep anew, or put on extra flesh.
Not bad for “first fruits,” though her hunch that the Times readership might up the ante was on target. Ms. Winch did not employ blanks — though this was not spelled out in the challenge.
Two days later, the Sydney Morning Herald reprinted the challenge, garnering a number of replies, with the first published on March 18th from a Mrs. JD Ramsbottom of Cronulla (who did make use of blanks, indicated in bold):
The zebras are bounding too anxiously alongside miles of quick-flowing river water just to evade painted pea machinery.
First, let us applaud the pioneering spirit. As the first respondent, no quality standards had yet been set. Her creation starts strong — nothing but plausible zebra-related imagery for a while— but then… “just to evade painted pea machinery?” Here, we note the opportunity for improvement. Perhaps the seaside temptations of Cronulla distracted Mrs. Ramsbottom from finishing her masterpiece. With a blank available, she could have closed out with:
…just to evade dirty ape & chimpanzee.
London Times readers managed some lively replies the following week, mostly referencing the contest itself. Here was the winner, from a British expat salesman living in Helsinki:
How sad, we vain Englishmen. Discard your unjustified lazy arrogance before it be too late. Equip to export. Make a living.
A more light-hearted entry was this “doggerel” (an apt-sounding term for generally frivolous verse):
I boxed a glad man of Peru
(A quietic Greek Jew on a gnu),
O, ’twas over in three
As I seized victory
O that silly blind man of Peru
With some basic cleanup, left to the enterprising reader, this entry could have taken its rightful place in Scrabblegram history. Regardless, it was the first indication that writing natural-sounding verse with 100 Scrabble tiles (or 98) could be possible.
One of the contributors to the Times contest, we should note, was an up-and-coming figure in the field of wordplay: Gyles Brandreth, who at the tender age of 23 had organized the UK’s first National Scrabble Championships. Brandreth would go on to write the New York Times best-seller The Joy of Lex (1980), as well as The Scrabble Book (1984). In the latter book, Brandreth recapped the Times contest and offered a fine 98-letter specimen:
I was the just queen of an empire. I gazed on Britain. I have ruled so long. So I expected loyalty back. I favoured not grim war.
Next Level
In 1989, Pete Stickland of Ontario, Canada advanced the art form, publishing 120 of what he called “babblegrams” in his “Tower of Babble” pamphlet. The journal Word Ways reported some high-quality 100-letter examples (blank tiles again indicated in bold):
Soviet occupying army will quit divided Afghanistan, export woe again, as mujahedeen rebels forge on to terrorize Kabul.
Queasy radioman wept: got to eye ferocious blaze of vivid aerial explosion, cremating wilted Hindenburg at Lakehurst, NJ.
Countrymen, I am to bury, not eulogize, Caesar; if evil lives on, bequeathing injury, good oft expires: a palsied awkward death!
The last is a remarkably spot-on adaptation of Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar, and opens up a whole new avenue for adapting other quotes.
Scrabblegrams have maintained their international appeal over the years. In New Zealand, for instance, Jeff Grant kept the pastime going. According to Forwords, the magazine of the New Zealand Association of Scrabble Players, Grant came up with an example in 1995, and Forwords later published other Kiwi concoctions. (See our master list for all published examples.)
The 100-tile challenge kicked into gear again in August 1997, when GAMES Magazine ran their “Tale of the Tiles” contest. With winners judged for overall impressiveness and entertainment value, there were some pretty dazzling entries. Runners-up included:
“Is the diamond brooch jewelry of great value?” I ask, admiring its deep opulence again. “I love it.” “But of quartz,” he answers, “onyx.”
This has a strong thematic core (jewelry, quartz, onyx) that takes out the difficult JQXZ, and also sets up a punny reveal, as did many entries.
Andrew Chaikin, aka the performer Kid Beyond (though the author’s fraternal relation, no relation to Beyond Wordplay)— merited an honorable mention with this noir-ish entry:
Boulevard Diner. Eleven-forty.
I down a hot cup of java.
It’s too quiet.
As a gun barrel whacks my noggin,
I realize:
Dixie set me up.
At best, a Scrabblegram should slide by the reader like natural prose — nothing to see here, move along — and this entry certainly packs in thematic ideas, with no distracting or disjointed elements. Definitely a GOAT contender.
But the grand prize winner rose a notch above — figuratively and literally — which we will see in a bit.
Innovations
With time and tiles on their hands, some in the Scrabble tournament community have taken on the Scrabblegram challenge, when not busy studying word lists or managing their game clock. Dan Stock of Medina, OH became known for his “Scrableaux,” Scrabblegrams designed for artful display on the board.
At the 2000 National Scrabble Championship, he and I collaborated on a limerick to commemorate winner Joe Edley (memorialized in Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak):
For fun, a champion Edley
Kept victories going quite readily.
Verbose Joe is,
An anagram wiz
Exultant about his word medley.
Stock and others have expanded the creative bounds of what is possible with 100 tiles, including theme boards, symmetries, and other fanciful ideas.
The output here is so fertile we will give it its own post in future.
Recent Contenders
Last September — 22 years after its original contest and 44 years after the first published Scrabblegram — GAMES went back to the well running its “Verse-a-Tiles” contest, adding the constraint that all entries be poems of some sort.
The winner, by I. Snowfire of Wellington, ME was chock-full of flavorful detail:
Working apace a Mesozoic Age dig,
We had rifled every earthy qubit.
Neither pelvis nor maxilla found —
Just no bones about it!
And while clever, there are too many words used imprecisely— qubit is a unit of quantum data storage, for example — to consider it the GOAT.
No, that honor we will bestow on the winner of the original GAMES Magazine contest from 1997, submitted by David Cohen from Atlanta, GA — whose limerick bravely met the challenges of meter, rhyme, and sensibility to achieve a seamless and sublime result — Beyond Wordplay’s choice for the greatest Scrabblegram published to date:
A clown jumps above a trapeze.
Arcs over one-eighty degrees.
Out into mid-air,
Quite unaware
Of his exiting billfold and keys.
But don’t let that intimidate you — dump out those tiles and give it a go! If you’d like to share your favorite diversions using all 100 tiles, leave them in the comments below, or tweet at us at @beyondwordplay. And if you want to see all the Scrabblegrams that have been published over the years, check out our master list here.
Even without an opponent, there’s no reason to be bored…at the board.
Update: Following the publication of this article, GOAT author David Cohen reached out and provided some more of his work — is this Zen Scrabblegram the new GOAT? Such attachments to competitive glory no longer seem to apply, so we will let this koan speak for itself:
The average fool arrives here blind,
An ego waking up to find
A quiet, conscious, empty mind.
Now today I realize.
Relax.
Just be.
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