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Comment by thom

2 days ago

Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably slightly below the average for an elite player.

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thom

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yunwal  1 day ago

Zizzed and jazzed if spelled in scrabble would be worth less than 32, since only one of the zs would be worth 10 points, the rest being blank tiles which are worth zero.

Of course most good players will create more than 1 word per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.

You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable words, although at a certain level not being able to get a lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.

  • ronjakoi  1 day ago

    Single-syllable words can still be pretty long, like "squished" or "scrambled"

    • schoen  1 day ago

      I just ran some code over the CMU pronouncing dictionary and the longest words identified as single-syllable that are English-origin and not proper names or possessives were

        9 SCRATCHED
  9 SCREECHED
  9 SCROUNGED
  9 SCRUNCHED
  9 SQUELCHED
  9 STRAIGHTS
  9 STRENGTHS
  9 STRETCHED

      For eight letters, it found dozens of examples!

      The CMU dictionary thinks that "scrambled" is two syllables as a vowel ends up between the "b" and the "l" in pronunciation. Wiktionary thinks this is a syllabic l (/l̩/), which should probably be counted as a separate syllable even if it isn't considered a vowel.

      Wikipedia says

      > Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in words such as even [ˈiːvn̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈiːvən/).

      That's consistent with what the CMU dictionary is doing, perhaps treating /l̩/ as /əl/.