We are getting to that time of year again. The other day while doing an unrelated list I found a word which referred to a nun whose duty it was to keep an eye on the younger nuns in the convent. The really good thing was that it contained both the letters X and Z. What better Xmas present could there be than to be able to play a word with both of those two letters? So the quiz this week is just to list as many legal scrabble words as you can think of that have got both X and

The blog is almost entirely quiz this week because I am covering some basic 7 letter bingos that everybody ‘should’ know. However, I suspect that many intermediate players either do not know some of them or would struggle to find the word if they got them on their rack. How well do you know your building block bingos? The quiz has 32 words, but they are all such common letters that zyzzyva, my word program, lists them as being in the top 100 most probable words if you just d

He LIKED the CHEEK of the BROKE YOKEL BIKIE doing the NAKED POLKA No, I haven’t been smoking anything this morning. The list this week will be on 5 letter words including a K (but not an S) that also have another anagram. In some cases both the words are well known and you might spot either word. FAKER FREAK WAKER WREAK But think how often you have played the first word of the following combinations when the other word might have been able to be placed for a bigger score. M