Does playing Scabble increase your vocabulary

how about eating scrapple?

Does playing Scabble increase your vocabulary

Does playing Scabble increase your vocabulary

I have read that people who do not even speak English have participated in official Scrabble tournaments and done fairly well.

Also competing in Division 1 were six Thai players. Scrabble is used as a tool for teaching English in schools in Thailand, and tournaments there regularly include more than 1,000 competitors. In last year's world championship, in Kuala Lumpur, the best-of-five final was played between two young Thai men, Panupol Sujjayakorn and Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, who are 18 and 27 years old, respectively. At the end of Day 3, three of the six stood in the top 11"Pakorn, Charnwit Sukhumrattanaporn (who is 25), and Komol Panyasophonlert (19).
Panupol, Pakorn, and their countrymen illustrate one of the odd truths about Scrabble: It's as much of a math game as it is a word game. Imagine that the 26 letters of the alphabet are 26 different colors. The colors are distributed in different amounts"there are 100 color pieces distributed in all, with some repetition"and certain combinations of colors, in certain orders, are acceptable, while others are not. For instance, if A = red, B = blue, and C = green, then GREENREDBLUE (i.e., CAB) would be acceptable, while no other combination of those colors would be. Many of the foreign players"most of whom are Thai"know minimal English (which speaks to the insufficiency of Scrabble as a teaching tool for linguistics). And while it's true that having a large vocabulary is a good place to start if you want to be a good Scrabble player, at the highest levels it can also be an advantage not to speak English at all.

Let's say I know that THOU is a four-letter word. If I don't automatically know whether THOUED or THOUING are words, I would probably be able to guess because I understand how nouns and verbs function as parts of speech. THOUING and THOUED seem like they would be nonsense. But in fact they are acceptable: THOU can be a verb, meaning "to address as 'thou.' " If I didn't speak English, knowing the words THOU, THOUED, and THOUING would be as simple as memorizing three "words""one of four letters, one of six letters, one of seven. But what you think of as "words," the savvy Scrabbler knows to be "letter strings." In other words, they are just combinations of letters. You wouldn't have to know whether these "words" had any relation whatsoever to each other as parts of speech, and no word"CATCH, for instance"would look any more "normal," or "reasonable," than, say, CRWTH (which is actually acceptable). So it's simple"as long as you know all the letter strings. The expert players do, and I don't.

For example, QAT and QI are incredibly useful words for scoring lots of points with those dreaded Q stones. Neither of them, however, helps me say anything I want to say in actual conversation.