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.
Mark Nyman is an English professional Scrabble player originally from London, England and now a resident in Cheshire. At the end of 2002, he was rated 205 and was top-rated in the ABSP ratings. As at 7 September 2015 he is rated 200. His 27 consecutive tournament game wins is an ABSP record. He is most widely known as the first British player to win the World Scrabble Championship, which he accomplished in 1993. He married in 2004 and has two children, Max and Kizzy.
The World Scrabble Championship (WSC) is played to determine the world champion in competitive English-language Scrabble. It was held in every odd year from 1991 to 2013; from 2013 onwards, it became an annual event.
Collins Scrabble Words is the word list used in English-language tournament Scrabble in most countries except the US, Thailand and Canada. The term SOWPODS is an anagram of the two abbreviations OSPD and OSW, these being the original two official dictionaries used in various parts of the world at the time. Although the two source dictionaries have now changed their respective titles, the term SOWPODS is still used by tournament players to refer to the combination of the two sources. There has not been any actual hard-copy list produced called SOWPODS, although the current Collins Scrabble Words, or CSW, is in effect the full SOWPODS list by a different name.
Stewart Holden is a competitive Scrabble player from the United Kingdom. Holden is originally from Oxford but has resided near Belfast, Northern Ireland since 2008. He represented England at the World Scrabble Championship 2003, where he finished in 62nd place, and represented Northern Ireland at the World Scrabble Championship 2011 where he finished in 28th place and achieved the highest game score of the tournament (694pts).
The Scrabble Players Championship is the largest Scrabble competition in North America. The event is currently held every year, and from 2004 through 2006 the finals were aired on ESPN and ESPN2. The 2023 event was held in Las Vegas from July 15–19, 2023, with Joshua Sokol emerging as champion.
Allan Simmons is a British scrabble expert who was one of the founder members of the Association of British Scrabble Players and succeeded Peter Finley as its chairman. He was the first chairman of the World English-language Scrabble Players Association. He was also the 2008 UK National Scrabble Champion.
Helen Gipson is a Scrabble player. On 4 December 2005 her ABSP rating peaked at third in Britain, making her the highest rated woman, and she is consistently rated as the top female player in the world. In January 2009 she won the UK Open beating a strong field including the world champion Nigel Richards.
Joseph Edley is a professional Scrabble player and author, and the first player to win the National Scrabble Championship three times.
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.
The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary or OSPD is a dictionary developed for use in the game Scrabble, by speakers of American and Canadian English.
High score Scrabble is a variant of the board game Scrabble that was popular among tournament players in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. The first National Scrabble Championship of the UK was played by high score rules in 1971, and was won by Steven Haskell.
English-language Scrabble is the original version of the popular word-based board game invented in 1938 by US architect Alfred Mosher Butts, who based the game on English letter distribution in The New York Times. The Scrabble variant most popular in English is standard match play, where two players compete over a series of games. Duplicate Scrabble is not popular in English, and High score Scrabble is no longer practised.
NASPA Games, formerly known as North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA), is a nonprofit organization founded in 2009 to administer competitive Scrabble tournaments and clubs in North America. It officially took over these activities from the National Scrabble Association (NSA) on July 1, 2009. As of July 31, 2021, the organization is no longer associated with the North American owner of the SCRABBLE® trademarks, Hasbro, Inc.
The UK National Scrabble Championship (NSC), a British national scrabble tournament, held annually since its inception in 1971. While it was formerly organised by Mattel, the copyright owners of Scrabble in the UK, since 2014 it is organised by Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP). It is one of five major scrabble tournaments in the UK. The other four comprise of the UK Open, the British Isles Elimination Scrabble Tournament (BEST), the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship (BMSC) and the UK Masters. The current UK champion is Paul Allan.
The World English-Language Scrabble Players' Association (WESPA) is the overarching global body for English-language national Scrabble associations and similar entities.
Andrew Fisher is an international Scrabble player who represented England in international competition but now lives in and represents Australia having emigrated in 2002. He was the World Scrabble Championship 2011 runner-up, the UK National Scrabble Champion in 1996 and the Australian National Scrabble Champion in 2006, 2009 and 2012. He co-wrote a book called How to Win at Scrabble with David Webb, and was the champion of series one of the SBS Television game show Letters and Numbers. He is a chartered accountant by profession.
The UK OPEN Scrabble Tournament is a British Scrabble tournament that was first organised in 2008. It is one of five major flagship tournaments overseen by the Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP).
Brett Smitheram is a Scrabble Grand Master and one of the most successful players in the history of the game. Smitheram is the reigning (2022) UK National Scrabble Champion, defeating a high-calibre field in June. He won the 2016 World Scrabble Championship, and has been ranked in the World top 5, and as a UK Scrabble Grand Master for nearly 20 years. Originally from Camborne, Cornwall, he lives in London and is a Head of Talent, specialising in building hiring and people functions for start-ups and more established businesses.
Craig Beevers is an English professional Scrabble player and former World Scrabble Champion.
