Scrabble Books

I bought this book before it was available in the states. Took forever to get it , but didn't want to wait until July to Buy it. It is a very good dictionary for Sowpods.

Eula

I bought this book as a Christmas gift for my nephew. He absolutely ate it up! (It wasn't too hard, either.) It's colorful, educational, and was a fun thing for us to do together.

I'll definitely get more sticker puzzle books in the future.

I own a very old (1953 Edition) of "The Scrabble Word Guide" with over 30,000 Words From Funk & Wagnalls New College Standard Diction. Foreword by James Brunot, of Scrabble fame. I love this book and have since purchased The Third Edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and DO NOT LIKE IT as well. I would like to purchase three (3) copies of Jacob Orleans and Edmund Jacobson's "The Scrabble Word Guide" for family and friends. This is an excellent and easy to follow word book.

The title caught my eye. "Scribble" and writing I understood, but scrabble just didn't fit. Then I read the first chapter. Daniel Meier has been a classroom teacher, teacher educator, and researcher and through his book Scribble scrabble- he has given me back the importance and pride of early literacy efforts. In this ethnographic study Meier presents detailed pictures of children from diverse backgrounds learning to make sense of literacy in a preschool setting. The stories he provides are formed from the very words of children and interpreted by a careful listener and an observer grounded in theory. Scribble Scrabble is important because its purpose is to find common ground between developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive literacy teaching. Meier then wants to communicate those findings to teachers, teachers-to-be, and others interested in understanding and improving the literate lives of children, teachers, and families in urban schools.

The Word Game Power Workout by Rita Norr and Audrey Tumbarello exercises your mind in ways you wouldn't think possible. The variety of puzzles alone is mind-boggling! Rita and Audrey have clearly put a lot of time and effort into constructing so many puzzles and word games and showing us different ways of thinking about the alphabet and the ways we use it. Anyone who wants to become a better Scrabble player needs this book for practice.

We love Scrabble at our house, and it's even more fun with this dictionary in hand. Since part of our playing goal is to learn new words, "our rules" state that you can use the dictionary to find words that fit the letters you have. We wouldn't play without it.

The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) 4th edition is a must have for anyone looking for an edge in the game of Scrabble. Whether for competion or a friendly game you'll be glad you have this to refer to once a challenge is announced.

Having received numerous calls from my daughter in Colorado to settle disputes in on-going Scrabble games (mother: the all-wise source), I bought her a copy of the Scrabble Dictionary. She now enjoys peaceful Scrabble games with her family and can save her calls to Mom for chatty conversations about her adventurous daily life.

I purchased the Scrabble Dictionary for both of my kids as we are avid players and my old dictionary was not capturing 'today' words.
My kids are 21 and 31 and they were both happy to receive their very own dictionary.
thanks! The price was great too!

This is a great dictionary for weirdoes like me who enjoy increasing their vocabulary at the cost of their sanity. On the minus side, it's insufferably light on definitions. An example is "PATAGIAL---pertaining to a patagium." O-kayyyy! On the plus side, it is absolutely filled with odd nouns, inflected verb forms, antiquated spellings, and just plain old everyday words. THE OFFICIAL SCRABBLE PLAYERS DICTIONARY is a must if you have six random consonants and two "I"s. Ichthyic.

A friend recommended this one to me. Not a topic that I ever even knew existed - professional scrabble! But this is a fascinating subculture populated by lovable misfits -- the introverted nebbish Joel from New York, the hip Marlon, who comes from one of the poorest black neighborhoods in America, but scrapes by on his earnings from his totally ingenious mastery of a word game most of us know only as a casual past-time. Fatsis writes with genuine affection for his subject - despite using the term "freak" in his title - and he is a really good guide to the intricacies of the game, which, when played at a really high level is far more complicated than I ever could have imagined. He also gives an excellent overview of the history of the game itself - its invention, its commercialization, its growth as a kind of American icon among board games. I can't say how glad I am that I read this book. It's a joy...even if the topic is a bit unusual. Highly, highly recommend.

My advice:

1. Consider the title/subjectmatter of WF. If you're not curious, take a pass.
2. If you are curious, read the first chapter. If
2.a. You're not totally (I do mean totally) sucked in, take a pass on the rest
2.b. You're totally (ditto) sucked in, read on.

My guess is that all of the middling/negative reviews on this page were posted by disgrunted 1- or 2a-readers who should have hit the eject-button early on; all of the praising reviews from us 2b-ers, contentedly strapped in for the ride. With all due respect to 1- and 2a-ers -- and with no aim to convert them from their 1/2a-ish ways (many of them have my sympathies, in fact) -- I'll just say that I'm squarely in the 2b camp. I thought WF was terrific, soup to nuts. I loved every character study, every competition, every lead-up to the next competition, every bout of authorly self-doubt, every instance of authorly self-satisfaction. Fatsis does a brilliant job of capturing -- and, indeed, being captured within -- an exceedingly odd subculture at the crossroads of game- and math-geekdom, on the wire (often literally) between sanity and insanity.

Fatsis writes about Scrabble-mania with a true insider's knowledge, and with a deep affection for both his subjectmatter and his subjects. The result is a greatly engaging, at times inspiring, often humorous, occasionally pathetic glimpse into a slice of life few of us can imagine, but one we must on some level respect.

WF is an odd and entertaining bit of social history. A wonderful read!

I am actually in the process of returning this product because the first five chapters were put in the book upside down and backwards. It wouldn't be too much of a problem but the pages were cut incorrectly and the first three or so sentences are missing from the top of each page.

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Fluff or not? Not
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---- Comments ----
Annoying and weird, funny, loveable, eccentric, talented, and driven - the multitude of players Fastis helps us get do know display all of these characteristics and many more. There's gobs of interesting scrabble history, trivia, strategy, and tournament play-by-play but what this book was really about for me was obsession: it was about how obsession grows, how it manifests differently in different people but, more importantly, how it can happen to anyone. Obsession is something with which I can identify. Whether you're a Scrabble player or not doesn't matter for there's so much in here about being human, about mechanisms for survival, for determining self worth, and for simply having fun that you won't be able to put it down - prone to obsession or not.

---- What I liked ----
The nuts and bolts shared about the game and strategy, the idiosyncrasies of the main players, and the personal details the author shared about his scrabble journey and the relationships he developed with some of the other main characters.

---- What I didn't ----
Well, now I'm hooked on Scrabble

A friend loaned me this book about the time we were attempting to create an intraoffice Scrabble tournament (and she was in the process of proving how very much better she is than I am at this game). The most obvious thing Stefan Fatsis' skilled reporting demonstrates is the vast gulf that exists between casual players like us and the handful of top players for whom the game can be a time-consuming, even life-consuming, obsession.

It's a world that's hard for me to understand, in part because my competitive gene is relatively underdeveloped. What makes "Word Freak" particularly interesting, however, is watching the author himself slowly transforming from outsider into one of the inner, obsessive corps of championship-level players. Unlike, say, "Wild and Outside," in which Fatsis was able to retain reportorial objectivity, here he becomes part of his story -- "new journalism," of a sort, and Fatsis makes several references to George Plimpton and his sojourn in the NFL.

On the whole, "Word Freak" is a fairly remarkable piece of writing -- part memoir, part history, part nature journal. The author paints memorable pictures of his central characters, one that made me want to look them up and see how they're doing (or even if some of them are still alive) five years after the fact. Equally memorable is his portrayal of himself, and his ability to retain a certain distance from the change he's undergoing while, at the same time, experiencing it fully. For the reader, the ride can be simultaneously entertaining and disturbing as we see Scrabble as both a game and a mania. It's a combination that makes for a book most readers, I'd expect, won't soon forget ... particularly since so many of us probably have a Scrabble set of our own gathering dust in a bookshelf or closet.

I bought this as a gift for my Mother. I do not believe she has used the book yet. Shopping was efficient on your web site. Purchase came quickly. You are excellent!

We gave this as a gift to our daughter-in-law who loves playing Scrabble. She told us at least 4 times how much she liked it. So I'd say it's a winner!

Everything Scrabble is a very useful resource for any Scrabble player who wishes to take Scrabble to the next level. This book will teach you very useful two and three letter words, all the need-to-know 'Q' and 'Z' words, and can reshape the way you look at your Scrabble tiles. It is a bit lengthy- you can't really sit down with it and read it in an hour; instead, it's designed to take each chapter in steps to improve your skills overall. Everything Scrabble is very informative and interesting and definitely a good buy.

I was very pleased with my purchase of the above mentioned book. Fast shipping and well packaged.

The authors need to update this work. It still uses the words contained in OSWD 3. Anyone playing with a OSWD 4 knows that words like "Qi" and "Ki" are permissable and this edition of EVERYTHING SCRABBLE doesn't take that into account, so anyone using this version will be at a great disadvantage.

This is very useful for those of us who like playing word games, especially the page of two letter words.

You can pick up some good tips on how to beat your opponents from two-time National Scrabble Champion Joe Edley along with some challenging puzzles in this modest Scrabble puzzle book. I particularly recommend the material on pages 194-202 where Edley suggests that you develop the habit of asking yourself questions before making a play.

For example, question number one is, "Do I have a bingo?" (A good first question!) Question number two is the obvious, Which bonus squares are available, but question number three really gets to the nitty-gritty of good play: "Can you 'hook' any words? Look at every word already on the board and ask yourself if any single letter can be added to the front or back to form another word." Also important is question number four: "What will my 'leave' be after I've made my play?"

Too often the beginning player does not pay enough attention to the tiles he or she is going to be stuck with after a play. Sometimes, Edley advises, it is better to make a lower-scoring play in order to leave oneself with tiles likely (with a little help) to form a bingo.

The bulk of the book is devoted to Scrabble puzzles on various themes, e.g., "Placing your letters on hot spots"; using the J, Q, X and Z; two-, three-, four- and five-tile plays, etc. There is a diagram of the Scrabble grid with some plays already made. Underneath the diagram are the letters in several different racks. You are asked to find the best play. Edley recommends that you do the puzzles by setting them up on your own Scrabble board. I think that is the best way as well since the diagrams in the book are in black and white and so the bonus squares are not colored, and are highlighted only by the letters "DWS," "DLS" ("Double Word Score," "Double Letter Score"), etc. This makes it hard to get a quick feel for where to look. At least that was my experience.

A handy feature is the list of the 97 two-letter words allowed in official Scrabble tournaments on page 7. (I think that has been changed to 96 with "da" now being disallowed.) Interesting features include the weighed scores for answers to the various puzzles. For example, for the puzzle on page 93 there is an "expert" score (for five racks) of 155, a "good" score of 145, and an "average" score of 120. But Edley also gives his score of 164 and challenges you to beat it.

There are 800 puzzles, so this book will last through many a long winter's night; however this is not as good a book as the more substantial Everything Scrabble (revised 2001) by Edley (along with John D. Williams, Jr.), which I also recommend for the serious Scrabble player.

This is a good game if you're trying to find a way to make that 20 or 30 point word to put you in the lead for good. If I used it in some of my Online Scrabble games, I think that I would be fine. That's just me though.

This book is excellent as it contains many ways to improve and versify your Scrabble skills. There are many new games and approaches, which can range from novice to challenging. It contains many new words and methods of setting up the board during play, and if one really examines the games, one will certainly improve their Scrabble skills. As well, there are many games provided that will take hours to decipher and play.

So happy to have an updated version of this to replace my worn out copy. We use this book as a standard for all our favorite word games: Scrabble, Triversity & Quiddler.

Great book with many great clues and the 2 and 3 letter word sections are great for all scrabble players !! Highly recommend