Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, developers of Scrabulous on Facebook, an online version of the popular board game

Currently I am engaged in game 30,539,675 of Scrabulous on Facebook. I had resisted so far from adding this application, but now that I have done so, there seems no looking back. I am currently trailing by a small margin of 66 points to a student of mine, which is not a happy state of affairs for my professorial amour propre. Unfortunately, I only seem to have low-scoring consonants and vowels on my rack, including three Os. What word can you make with three Os? Ouagadougou is one, but I doubt whether the Scrabulous dictionary will accept the capital of Burkina Faso as a legitimate word.

The Scrabulous dictionary, by the way, is somewhat whimsical. It seems to believe that qi is a legitimate word, and allowed my student to rack up a whopping 33 points on her first move. Now all of us well-brought-up kids have been taught that ‘q’ is always followed by ‘u’. And what does qi mean anyway? According to Wikipedia, qi is a Mandarin word, meaning the active principle forming part of any living thing, while its logogram is meant to represent ‘steam rising from the rice as it cooks’.

Which is all very well, but is it English? A further trawl through Wikipedia revealed that from March 2006, the word qi has indeed been ruled valid by Scrabble, the original game of which Scrabulous is an unauthorised derivative. In fact, the makers of Scrabble, Hasbro and Mattel, have asked Scrabulous to shut down, leading to a Save Scrabulous campaign among users of Facebook, the social networking site on which Scrabulous can be played. Scrabulous, by the way, was developed by two commerce graduates from St Xavier’s College, Calcutta, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, in 2005. Both brothers were avid players and felt that there should be a free gaming site where online games could be played.

At first glance, Scrabulous does seem remarkably similar to Scrabble, though there are many additional features by which one can archive one’s games and compare global scores. The word which seems to have achieved the highest score ever is the Italian word singhiozzerebbe, the third-person singular of the singhiozarre, which means ‘to sob’. This word was played by Marco Pagano (game 2,293,462) and earned the good signor 2,118 points. Yes, 2,118 points. However, if one looks at the move history of the game, one can see that he had foregone almost all of his moves to swap tiles and ensure that he had the necessary letters. In fact, all his games seem to feature some variation of singhiozzerebbe, as well as another word called squalificherete, which means ‘to disqualify’. Ah well, to each his own. In the meantime, I continue to wrack my brain for a word with three Os. Maybe I should switch to Italian.

The author teaches English at Jadavpur University