As Easter is upon us, it is time for an Easter Egg hunt. This one is slightly different from other egg hunts you may have encountered. The eggs are very obvious in each of the 10 words below, but only 7 of them are real words. Your mission is to decide which ones are the 3 rotten eggs. Answers are at the bottom of the blog. EGGFRUIT EGGLERS EGGLING EGGWHITE FLEGGED LEGGISM PEGGIEST TALEGGIO UNBEGGED VEGGIEST So while you try to digest those eggs we will move on to Easter. If you have those 6 letters on your rack you have a good chance of being able to play a bingo. Some of them are quite easy words to find, but it is often useful to know all the possibilities with a combination this

Having seen the second and third days of the cricket heavily affected by that wet stuff falling out of the sky I thought I might use RAIN as a theme. Keeping the format similar to last week I am going to give you a quiz at the top of this blog, with the answers at the bottom. This quiz is a little different. It is to see how many 8 letter words you can think of that start with RAIN. So you are looking for words that would fit into this pattern: R A I N _ _ _ _ There are 14 words for you to find. While you are pondering that I am going to give you a list of all the 7 and 8 letter words that end with –RAIN. These would have been much harder to think of because the meanings have nothing

In New Zealand we play with what is called the 5 point challenge rule. It means that you can challenge one of your opponent’s words and if it turns out to be correct they just get an extra 5 points. Not a very big price to pay. Occasionally you will dislike both the word they play and another word made in the same turn, perhaps by hooking an S on the end of a word already on the board. In that case you can challenge both words, but it will give your opponent an extra 10 points if they both turn out to be correct. Both words have to be challenged at the same time. You are not allowed to challenge one word, and if it is correct, come back to the board and say you would like to challenge anothe

Having too many U’s on your rack can certainly be a drawback. Maybe this list of 5 letter words with at least 2 U’s will help in that situation. I have restricted it to words that have two U’s but that you don’t need an S to play. That would be a much bigger list because of words ending -US, such as MUCUS. AHURU A small fish AUGUR To tell from signs AURUM Gold BUCHU / BUCKU Alternative spellings of an African medicinal plant BUNDU A remote, uncultivated region BUTUT The currency of Gambia CUTUP A mischievous person DURUM A stra

Sometimes it takes a while for our dictionary to catch up with our changing language. You may have seen an advertisement on television depicting a seal talking about the ‘merroir’ of Marlborough Regal Salmon. I thought I hadn’t seen the word before and a check revealed that it would not be legal if played in a game of scrabble. However a check of the internet revealed the following information: A food writer for The Seattle Times, coined the term in 2003 after having some particularly fresh Pacific oysters. “Mer” (which means “sea”) is combined with the suffix “-oir” (which usually denotes a specific place) to provide a marine corollary to the word “terroir” (see the list below)—a term for t