The Word's the Thing

Jeremy Taylor goes head to head with world Scrabble champion Brett Smitheram, who’s the closest thing to a walking dictionary

- Jeremy Taylor

THERE are 161,293 reasons why you shouldn’t contemplate a game of Scrabble with Brett Smitheram. That figure is the total number of eligible words between two and nine letters long in the game’s latest dictionary and, incredibly, Mr Smitheram’s brain has soaked up almost all of them. The 38 year old admits that his biggest problem now is forgetting the redundant ones dropped from each new edition of Collins’s Official Scrabble Words.

‘There are actually 276,663 entries in the current dictionary, but that includes words up to 15 letters long,’ explains Mr Smitheram as we sit down to play. ‘realistically, nobody would study beyond nine, although I have used maidservant and springtail.’

I’ve chosen Peter Harrington rare Books in London for our game, mainly because the shop has an intimidating collection of dictionaries that could prove a distraction. Perhaps the 1755 edition of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language might be a suitable piquancy (triple-word score: 152).

However, I’m going to need more than luck. even a watching group of well-read staff is bamboozled as Mr Smitheram reveals his letter mixology: ‘I won last year’s title scoring 176 with braconid, which is a type of parasitic wasp.

‘My highest ever score was 302 with quatorze, but the world record for one word is caziques, played by Dr Karl Khoshnaw in 1982. It means Indian chief and, played across two triple-word scores, achieved 392.’