Ever since this troper played "kaf" (the 13th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ''which is in the dictionary'') for 40-some points in a game of ''[=UpWords=]'', he's looked up every single play he could possibly make that would be worth many points.

Isn't that against the rules?

Maybe, but that might not matter. How rich is the OP?

No law against reading the dictionary.

Non english words, even those in the dictionary, are technically not allowed under most rules.

If it's in an English language dictionary, it is, by definition, an English word.

So an unchanged foreign word, in spelling, pronunciation, and meaning, and put into the english dictionary simply because it has entered the common knowledge (at some point) is an English word? Search Meriam-Webster for the very French phrase "je ne sais quoi." It's there. And I've never met anyone who considers it English.

I believe that officially, if a foreign word or phrase can be used in colloquial English without a translation (coup, amigo, etc.), it's considered English. I have no idea what "je ne sais quoi" means, but if most English speakers do, it's English.

This troper and her mother often play casual two-player games in which the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary can be ''consulted'' for a word to play if you're really stuck... which only hones our skills for playing against others.

This troper was shocked when her usually dim witted brother played the word "epoxy" in a game of Scrabble.

This troper saw a skit in which a seemingly impossible distribution of letters was justified, as a prankster had switched the tiles for those from a Polish Scrabble set. This was discovered as soon as the players drew their initial seven letters: "Hang on, I've got three Zs! And what the hell's this thing?"

This troper once cleaned up in a game of Scrabble with "Fez" on a triple word score. The other campers, they were not happy.

...since when is fez not a word?

I once played "nkru" ("a West African welcoming ceremony", plural "nkrua"), "xaab" ("a Mayan musical instrument"), "yipse" ("an archaic term for a stomach ailment"), "eowa" ("an exclamation of surprise"), "fidge" ("an exclamation of contempt"), "fidgeing" (analogous formation to "tut-tutting"), and several "variant spellings". My opponent tried to play "roarz" but I told her "no variant spellings that look like they were made up by advertisers in an attempt to appeal to disaffected youth."

I can't possibly be the only one who oftens ends up putting down random words and be surprised when they actually show up. My family has feared challenging others when putting down some strange scramble of letters because of this.

No, I do that too...and I accidentally ended up using "shit" in Boggle once. It was a long time ago.

This troper and his friends play Wikiscrabble (any play that at least half of the players approve of/find hilarious is valid, regardless of cromulence) with 9 tiles instead of 7, leading to such gems as "whorelves". Quoth the player: "I want to play 'elves', but I don't want to kill my whores!" Orlando Bloom was referenced.

This Troper once played "plant." Her brother said it wasn't a word.

I did that with "lit" once...the "saying it's not a word" part. I felt like an idiot.

This troper spelled the word "tid", meaning a girl or young woman, in a game of Scrabble once. It aided in making a solid 3x3 square of letters. That's right, 3x3. He's also used the word "wem", meaning a stain, spot, or scar, repeatedly. Yeah, you can have those two for free.

This troper's grandfather is famous for this; in one noteworthy moment, when the word WINDOW was on the board, he proceeded to add ED to it, making WINDOWED, justifying it as "the verb for when they put the glass into your frame." Grandma grudgingly accepted that, only for him to, next turn, add to it again, leaving REWINDOWED, "What they do when you break the first set." This is the last recorded family Scrabble game on my mother's side.

Funnily enough, I've actually heard the term "rewindow" (as well as "dewindow") used in relation to computers (to dewindow is to minimize a window, to rewindow is to maximize it again). It's not likely to be in any dictionaries at this point, but your grandfather might still have stumbled upon a future cromulent word without knowing it.

This reminds me of the famous game in my family when we ended up with a 15 letter word in a game. (Please note that Scrabble is played on a 15x15 grid...that's right we had a word that reached both ends of the board.) It started with tab, then stab, then establish, then reestablish, then reestablishment. Scrabble Crowning Moment Of Awesome.

Once playing with my family, we got Camelopardesque all down one side of the board. And I had the 'esque'. It was awesome.

This troper, being an avid SherlockHolmes fan, once hijacked the H in an opponent's word in order to use all her own tiles to spell BROUGHAM for 95 points. (It's a kind of carriage.)

My family takes Scrabble very seriously. In one game, my sister played MORPH on the first turn. My little brother was up next and decided to be dumb about it like he usually does and played MORPHO. Naturally, my sister challenged it and looked it up in the dictionary. Turns out that morpho is actually a genus of butterfly. To this day we use "morpho" as a mock epithet.

N-word priviledges? Does that mean you're butterflies?

This troper once held onto his letters for turn after turn until he completed and played "TEKSOQP".

My Grandfather and I discovered there was nothing in the rulebook which said scrabble tiles had to be played letter up, so we use "blank" tiles to fill out words all the time!

When this troper was training for a Scrabble competition, the instructor advised us to put down words that at least ''seem'' to be real, and even gave us words to add to the illusion. Example: lipless. It's a real word, and after the opponent finds out it's real, they won't dare to call you out on eyeless or earless (which aren't real), on the off-chance that they are, too. He also told us to use swearwords, because even if the judges wouldn't allow it (it's a school competition, after all), the opponents would know it's a real word so they wouldn't dare to call it out either.

This troper attempts to play Japanese words so often while playing Scrabble that people have stopped challenging her. Naturally, this gives a lot of room for her to just make stuff up.

The words "qi", "xi", "xu" and "zo" are ''guaranteed'' to piss people off. (Chinese energy, subatomic particle named after Greek letter, Vietnamese coin and Himalayan yak respectively.) Particularly if they've just unloaded most of their rack to get 21 points, and then you get 62 for placing two letters.

This Troper's mother always handicapped me when I played against my younger brother. I've been blessed with a pretty broad vocabulary, so I can usually kill at this game. But she would insist his nonsensical words be allowed. Sundeck? I can accept that. SunDOCK? Not so much...

In one game that occurred when we were on vacation and thus without a dictionary, my dad accused me of making up "hale," "taiga," and "fenny" (although that one I did misspell, but we weren't playing for points, so it barely mattered), and wouldn't believe my definitions, despite knowing I have a large vocabulary and never cheat. I left the game in a huff after finishing off my tiles. My sister had meanwhile gotten stuck with nothing but a "V," two "O"s, and an "X." When she came up to the cabin, she told me she'd played XVOO. We agreed it was a country, then discussed what it's people would be called while getting ready for bed (for the record, "xvoonian").

I once convinced my mother that 'hualo' was a kind of wind, in the vein of sirocco and harmattan.

Re-roaringsella. That is all.

This troper once won a game of Quiddler with the word "Kea". It's a type of parrot that lives in New Zealand.

I did this once in boggle with "ainu". It's the elvish word for "holy one", but you're not supposed to use foreign languages (side note: if elvish isn't actually spoken anywhere, aside from the occasional convention, does it really count as a "foreign" language?). However, I looked it up anyway...and lo and behold, it's in the dictionary! (Name of a language.)

And an ethnic group in Japan. The first ethnic group to point to if someone says racism is only white-toward-black, in fact.

A former friend of this troper once played "termiteor" in a game of Upwords (with the rationale that it was some kind of pest control robot), and we both had a good laugh about it. It was a silly in-joke between us for quite a while afterward.

This troper's uncle tried to play 'neo' on a triple word score. I insisted it wasn't really a word, and my uncle said that it counted, "what about neo-nazis?" and this troper said it was merely a prefix. My mother (not wanting me to win, as I was ahead at the time) said: "what about neo lights?". I replied my yelling "It's NEON lights!". --; He ended up playing the word anyway. Also, if you want to win a Scrabble, memorise all the allowed two-letter words. I've beaten my mother and uncle in every game we played since doing that.

Let's just say when your significant other is an English teacher and his brother a med student, you're at a stark disadvantage in Scrabble.

In Swedish, there are extremely few words with a Q in them, because we use KV instead of QU in Latin loanwords (I can straight away only remember four). So when you get the sole Q tile, it is hard to get rid of it, QUILT being the easiest way out. However, once I astonished my wife by writing QUISLING (= traitor) across some really nice bonus squares while clearing my set and also ending the game.

This troper got bored with playing my Scrabble iPod app, and just put in random arrangements of letters. Most of them ended up getting accepted.

This troper was playing scabble, and had several letters that he thought would work together as a word. The word was "Japing", which was a total asspull. I tried to explain it as "You know! Japan! Japing! He japings! She japings! Everybody japings!" My friend only accepted "Ping"... Until the end of the class, when we looked it up on the internet to find out it was an actual word, meaning "To Joke". Japing is now a MemeticMutation at school.

Which completely explains why the joke shop in Hogsmeade is called "Gambol and Japes", now that I think about it.

This troper and his sister really annoyed our grandma when we played Scrabble with her one time, for the fact we where not using "American English" words (I really got in trouble for spelling "color" with a U, like they do in Europe, and my sister got in trouble for trying to use Toyota)

Not a Scrabble word, just a comment on the article. In the advertising section, it says: "And then called back in a later ad in which Shaq takes his opponents into the desert, and actually shows them a Shaqtus... a cactus with Shaq's face and number carved on it." That should have been in ''{{Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden}}''.

At one point, while playing Hangman and getting to choose the word, this troper actually used the trope title. (It's a real word now. It's one of the aliases of the creator of the Melissa worm.)

This troper's sister played the word YING, unaware of the correct spelling of "yin" and "yang". When called out on it, she instead justified it as the onomatopoeic representation of AudibleSharpness.

This Troper played Scrabble with his sister, with no dictionary. Cue a very heated argument over "adze", which she refused to believe was a wood-cutting tool. Later in the game, he played "gooks" on a triple word-score, only for her to claim that racial slurs aren't allowed.

Impossible to do in this troper's household: his stepmother is an English teacher. The letters I get are often hilariously bad, which can result in misspellings being allowed on the fact that I cannot put anything else. The scabble bag works in mysterious ways...

This troper subverted this trope and once won a game of scrabble with the word Quixotic, basically everybody gave up by the time we finished calculating the score.

In sort of an inversion, This Troper once played a PC Scrabble game and tried to put down "Aussie" only to find that it wasn't in the official dictionary.

Proper noun!

Can't be a proper noun if it's an adjective. You should have used the Macquarie.

This troper once played "za" and got challenged unsuccessfully. Next turn, I extended it to "zax" on a triple word score.

I played "dirty Scrabble" with a bunch of classmates on a really boring day of school. Made-up words were accepted as long as the majority of the players agreed that they sounded like real words and if the player could come up with a good definition.

Every member of my family utterly hates Scrabble, but we always end up playing it at least once during family gatherings. Tables have been flipped over contested words, I shit you not. On a funnier note, my older brother once challenged the word "Plant." And he's supposed to be TheSmartGuy.

Plant seems to be a popular word to accuse as not existing.

This troper likes using words from HarryPotter. These go largely unchallwenged within my family, but anywhere else, people are like "AVIS IS NOT A WORD!" Avis is, of course, a word: it is Latin for "bird", if I recall correctly.

One turn, I played, "cyning". Then I played "cyninga". The next, "cyningas". Why not? It's English!

@/Cuchulainn: I once tried this with the word quim. We were playing during in-house suspension. I'd read it in a porno mag. The teacher didn't buy it, but at least she didn't know where I got it.

I was trying to help my aunt put down a word, and I came up with "Quile". I liked it so much that I invented a definition for it: To quietly contemplate. I try to use it as often as possible, as well as my other made up words of Bishloo, Awlodifferous, and Huxdux.