Women Writers Online Scrabble Discovery Interface

Welcome to the Women Writers Online Scrabble Discovery Interface (WWO:SDI)! This exciting new tool enhances the texts in Women Writers Online by allowing users to discover the Scrabble® scores for the words in each text. WWO:SDI provides sortable lists for all WWO texts, making it possible for users to determine the highest- and lowest-scoring words in the collection. The chart also denotes a) words that cannot be played in a single turn because they are longer than seven letters, b) words that could not be played using the letters provided by a standard Scrabble® set (presuming neither of the 2 blank tiles are available), and c) words that could not be played using the letters provided by a standard Scrabble® set (presuming both of the 2 blank tiles are available).

For example, the highest-scoring words in Harriet Cheney’s 1824 novel, A Peep at the Pilgrims, are “characterized” and “philosophically,” both with 30 points—although neither could be played on a single turn. The highest-scoring word in Ann Yearsley’s 1787 Poems on Various Subjects is “whizzing” at 33 points, but this word would only be possible if a player used a blank tile or smuggled in an extra ‘z’ tile from another set. As this sortable index page reveals, the highest-scoring word in the entire WWO collection is “quizzically” at 43 points from Sarah Green’s 1810 Romance Readers and Romance Writers. The text with the highest average Scrabble® score is The Latter Examination of Anne Askew, 1547, which has words like “quyckeneth” and “excommunycate” at 31 points and “pertycypacyon” at 30 points. For sheer number of words that could be used in a Scrabble® game, the winner is Judith Murray’s 1798 The Gleaner, with 15,490 total playable words.

This interface uses cutting-edge technology to exclude words that are not allowed in standard Scrabble® games, drawing on the detailed encoding in the Women Writers Online collection. For example, excluding the contents of <name>, <persName>, <orgName>, <placeName>, and <speaker> removes many proper nouns from the results. Similarly, the interface excludes dialect and non-English words. We have also regularized some archaic letterforms, such as the long s (ſ), and regularized some spelling, such as i/j and u/v substitutions. The interface displays expanded versions of abbreviations and corrections of errors, wherever these are available.

We are confident that our readers will find the WWO:SDI a valuable research tool, as well as a useful pedagogical resource. At long last, it is possible to compare texts by the important metric of their maximum and average scores in a Scrabble® game. We hope that this tool will revolutionize the study of early women writers and perhaps lead to new fields of word-game based literary scholarship.

Please note that Women Writers Online requires a subscription; for more information on licensing and to set up a one-month free trial, see here.

Click on a column header to sort by that column.