External links
- Canonical List of Anamonics (maintained by John Chew)
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An anamonic is a form of mnemonic device frequently employed by tournament Scrabble players (the word anamonic is itself a portmanteau of anagram and mnemonic). It consists of a six or seven letter "stem" (often, but not always, an acceptable word itself), paired with a phrase in which each letter can be added to the stem and rearranged (anagrammed) to form a new word. Typical stems are sets of six or seven letters, as such anamonics aid in learning and in finding valuable seven- and eight-letter bingo (UK: "bonus") plays. Just as importantly, a player can quickly verify that he or she should not waste valuable time looking for a word in a set of letters that is ruled out by an anamonic.
A successful anamonic will typically have some memorable semantic relationship to the stem. It will usually avoid unnecessary or easily confused words, which might lead to a misconception of just which letters combine with the stem.
When no vowel combines with the stem, an anamonic phrase will typically make use of multiple vowels that are meant to be ignored. A skilled Scrabble player will typically be able to verify that at least one of these vowels does not form an acceptable word with the stem, thereby avoiding confusion.
Authorship of particularly noteworthy anamonics is often acknowledged, although this is not necessarily expected by the Scrabble community.
TSUNAMI: COASTAL HARM
The term "anamonics" was coined in a private letter to Nick Ballard in 1993. The coiner was Bob Lipton, who was probably the first or second player in history to make extensive use of anamonics before they even had a name. Lipton's first anamonics were constructed in the summer of 1987. It was Ballard who first popularized the technique in a series of articles published in the now-defunct newsletter "Medleys."
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An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word anagram itself can be rearranged into nag a ram, as well as the word binary into brainy and the word adobe into abode.
Clabbers is a game played by tournament Scrabble players for fun, or occasionally at Scrabble variant tournaments. The name derives from the fact that the words CLABBERS and SCRABBLE form an anagram pair.
Leet, also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Additionally, it modifies certain words based on a system of suffixes and alternate meanings. There are many dialects or linguistic varieties in different online communities.
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
Upwords is a word game invented by Elliot Rudell and originally published by the Milton Bradley Company, now a division of Hasbro. Worldwide marketing rights to Upwords have been licensed to Spin Master Inc. by Rudell Design, LLC as of 2018. Upwords is similar to Scrabble or Words With Friends, in that players build words using letter tiles on a gridded gameboard. The point of difference is that in Upwords letters can be stacked on top of other letters already on the gameboard to create new words. The higher the stack of letters, the more points are scored. This typically makes words built in later turns of the game more valuable than earlier words, increasing play intensity and adding a level of strategy unique to Upwords. The memorization of two-letter words is considered a useful skill in this game.
V, or v, is the twenty-second letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is vee, plural vees.
A mnemonicdevice, or memory device, is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering) in the human memory for better understanding.
Anagrams is a tile-based word game that involves rearranging letter tiles to form words.
A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases that cross each other, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer words and phrases are placed in the grid from left to right ("across") and from top to bottom ("down"). The shaded squares are used to separate the words or phrases.
Alfred Mosher Butts was an American architect, famous for inventing the board game Scrabble in 1938.
A blanagram is a word which is an anagram of another but for the substitution of a single letter. The term has its origin in competitive Scrabble, where a blank tile on a player's rack may be used to form any of several possible words in conjunction with the player's other tiles.
Scrabble variants are games created by changing the normal Scrabble rules or equipment.
Francophone Scrabble, or French-language Scrabble, is played by many thousands of amateurs throughout the world and the Fédération internationale de Scrabble francophone has more than 20,000 members. Just as in English, points are scored by playing valid words from the lettered tiles. In French there are 102 tiles - 100 lettered tiles and two blanks known as jokers. The official word list for Francophone Scrabble is L'Officiel du jeu Scrabble.
In the game of Scrabble, a challenge is the act of one player questioning the validity of one or more words formed by another player on the most recent turn. In double challenge, if one or more of the challenged words is not in the agreed-upon dictionary or word source, the challenged player loses her/his turn. If all challenged words are acceptable, the challenger loses his/her turn.
Euouae is an abbreviation used as a musical mnemonic in Latin psalters and other liturgical books of the Roman Rite. It stands for the syllables of the Latin words saeculorum Amen, taken from the Gloria Patri, a Christian doxology that concludes with the phrase in saecula saeculorum. Amen. The mnemonic is used in the notation of the variable melodic endings of psalm tones in Gregorian chant.
Bingo is a term used in North American Scrabble for a play in which a player puts seven tiles on the board in a single turn. Mattel, the game's manufacturer outside North America, uses the term bonus to describe such a word. In French, it is called a scrabble. A player who does this receives 50-point bonus. The calculation of the bonus varies between the Hasbro and Mattel versions of the game, with the bonus applied before double- and triple-word scores multipliers in the Hasbro rules and after in the Mattel rules.
Tile tracking is a technique most commonly associated with the game of Scrabble and similar word games. It refers to the practice of keeping track of letters played on the game board, typically by crossing letters off a score sheet or tracking grid as the tiles are played. Tracking tiles can be an important aid to strategy, especially during the endgame when there are no tiles left to draw, where careful tracking allows each player to deduce the remaining unseen letters on the opponent's final rack. The marking off of each letter from a pre-printed tracking grid as the tiles are played is a standard feature of tournament play.
The orthography of the Sotho language is fairly recent and is based on the Latin script, but, like most languages written using the Latin alphabet, it does not use all the letters; as well, several digraphs and trigraphs are used to represent single sounds.
English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters (phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Braille letters, such as ⠡⟨ch⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print.
