When it comes to keeping their favourite vowel everyone knows that E is the best and U is the worst. With A, I and O there seems to be more individual preferences. Beginners have traditionally held on to the letter I because one of the most common ways for them to play a bingo is an –ING word. I have always preferred the letter A. In the old days, before everyone did their study on computers I had bingo lists that you looked up by putting the letters in alphabetical order and

I have a theory that the letters D and T don’t go together particularly well. You may think that I am being very picky and that there are far worse combinations, and you would be right. W and U for instance are not a good match. But just looking at letters you would normally welcome on to your rack they go together less well than other combinations. That is because there are few words which had DT or TD next to each other in sequence whereas D and R go together as a combinati

I finally managed to play OLIGURIA last week. Although I had known it for a long time, it was the first time I had played it. There are quite a few related words, so I thought a list involving them would be a good idea. You might be lucky enough to get a bonus word including U.R.I.A but it is more likely that you are trying to play off those 4 letters to keep your rack balanced when you have two A's and/or two R's or something. There is no 4 letter word with U-R-I-A so you ca

One thing I really enjoy is when a word that I only know from scrabble, is actually used in some other setting. I recently watched the first episode of a documentary series called “One Strange Rock” in which I learned that one of the most important organisms on our planet is the DIATOM. Diatoms are algae with distinctive cell walls made of silicon dioxide and they are responsible for producing a large part of the oxygen you are currently breathing. While trees do turn carbon