LETTER PERFECT : Scrabble Experts Have a Word for It, and It May Be Strange

They can say “ta” when their jo takes them to watch the ai in the zoo and they can swear “od” when they break an os while walking a li or two.

They are experts at the crossword game Scrabble and they are the first to tell you that it pays to know the 86 two-letter words that can be used legally in Scrabble play, although many may not be found in a standard Funk & Wagnalls dictionary.

Those words--and others from aa (a rough, cindery lava) to zyzzyva (a tropical weevil)--were spelled out Sunday, as nearly three dozen Scrabble enthusiasts gathered in Huntington Beach to compete in Step I of the North American Scrabble Open.

Joyce McFadden knows the list from the special Scrabble dictionary by heart, and it helped her beat her opponent in the first round of competition Sunday by a solid 202 points. Players who won two of four games Sunday qualified to advance to Step II, which will be held in March. Winners in Step II qualify to compete in the national Scrabble championships later this year.

“There’s ‘ae,’ which means ‘one,’ and ‘jo,’ which is Scottish for ‘sweetheart,’ ” explained McFadden, 50, of Garden Grove. “There’s the musical note ‘fa’ and the Greek letter ‘mu.’ And then there’s ‘wo,’ but I’m not sure what that means.”

Not too many people are sure what wo (an interjection and an archaic variant of “woe”) means, but McFadden is the first to point out that it’s not necessary to know what any word means to be a Scrabble whiz.

All it takes is knowing how to use such two-letter words, for they are the grout of the letter-tile game and “attach one word to another, which is the real skill” of Scrabble, McFadden said.

The goal of Scrabble is to win the most points by spelling out words crossword-puzzle style on a pink-and-blue board that is studded with squares. Wooden letter tiles are placed on the squares to form words. Letters are assigned point values, and many of the squares on the board increase the value of single letters or whole words.

As in most games, the winner is the one with the most points when the letters are used up. And when you can build on two-letter words such as ta (thank you), ai (a three-toed sloth), od (a mild expletive), os (bone) and li (a Chinese measurement roughly equal to one-third of a mile), the possibilities of scoring big practically octuply (increase eight-fold).

According to the toy company Selchow and Righter, an estimated 30 million North Americans play the popular board game, which was invented in 1933 by an unemployed architect from Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

McFadden is one of an estimated 10,000 aficianados who belong to official Scrabble Players Clubs, such as Club 34 of Huntington Beach, which hosted Sunday’s competition.

McFadden, who has played the game for the past five years, competes because “after a while, when you play at home, your friends don’t want to play with you anymore,” she said. “You get to know some words that aren’t regular English.”

Richard Johnson, a 37-year-old computer programmer from Santa Ana, has found another way to solve that problem. He plays by himself.

“I play one hand against the other hand,” Johnson said, after winning the first of his four games Sunday by a resounding 222 points. “Plus, I have a couple of computer programs that play Scrabble.”

When he gets tired of pitting left against right, or of losing to a computer, Johnson competes in Scrabble tournaments, because “most of the people you play are either not Scrabble players or not of the appropriate caliber.”

Words such as gid, a sheep disease, and jin, another word for genie, helped Johnson rack up 455 points in his first game Sunday. But it was the word outcries that netted him a whopping 86 points and gave him an early lead.

Another resourceful player scored 86 points with the word wanders by strategically placing the letters on the board, and winning a 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles in one turn.

“Actually, anyone can play, as long as they can spell and add,” Johnson said. “All kinds of people play: people who work in mechanic shops, lawyers, chemists, computer programmers, people off the street, housewives, retired people. And there’s a lot of little old ladies.”