About the One Page List of Scrabble Usefulness

I made a One Page list of Scrabble Usefulness [pdf] listing the most important scrabble words in a very compact form. This list is based on one given out by the National Scrabble Association. I've reformatted it and added some interesting new information.

The two letter words are in bold, and the letters to each side show front and back hooks: AA is a word (a type of lava), and so are BAA (noise a sheep makes) and AAH (exclamation), AAL (shrub), and AAS (plural of AA). If you're starting out in scrabble, don't worry about the hooks yet -- just memorize the 96 2-letter words. The second best thing to memorize (but much less important) are the "U-less Q Words." Dumps are useful later: "I Dumps" and "U Dumps" list all the 3- or 4-letter words with several i's or u's; "Vowel Dumps" lists all 3-, 4- or 5-letter words with more than 3/4 vowels.

If you just want the two letter words, here they are:

  aa ab ad ae ag  ah ai al am an  ar as at aw ax  ay ba be bi bo 
  by de do ed ef  eh el em en er  es et ex fa go  ha he hi hm ho 
  id if in is it  jo ka la li lo  ma me mi mm mo  mu my na ne no 
  nu od oe of oh  om on op or os  ow ox oy pa pe  pi re sh si so 
  ta ti to uh um  un up us ut we  wo xi xu ya ye  yo

To move from parlor play to competitive play, you should learn, in order:

1. The two-letter word list
2. To move the tiles on your rack around into many different positions while looking for words
3. To sacrifice points for better rack balance
4. To separate out prefixes and suffixes (de-, out-, -ier, -ly), then look for shorter strings that will lead to 7-letter words

The first four points will elevate your play immediately; the rest of this list is far less important.


5. The U-less Q Words
6. A few important anamonics: specifically TISANE, SATIRE, ARSINE and RETINA
7. The Vowel, I and U dumps
8. Some Intermediate Strategy
9. The three-letter word list
10. The four-letter J,Q,X,Z lists

Two Letter Words with Definitions