My partner and I play a lot of Scrabble. We’ve played at various formative moments throughout our relationship—even proposal day started off with play and bubbly.

Our Scrabble board collection currently consists of three languages: English, Spanish, and Dutch. Before I had played in a non-English language it had never occurred to me that—of course! there are different letter ratios based on the language!

Dutch & Spanish

A house rule of ours is that we can look and find words for our letters. I find it a fun way to discover new words, while also helping us when we’re stuck.

Playing in you non-native language makes for interesting and purposeful play:

• vocabulary building;

• spelling practice;

• pattern recognition;

• rewiring your brain.

Each tile set—of these three languages at least—have only 100 tiles. So, each individual letter’s points are directly related to the distribution ratios in words of those langauges.

In Dutch, it’s an easy way to learn how often Z is used in Dutch. 4-points.

English, 10.

In Spanish, there are additional letter-tiles! ll, ñ, rr—each worth 8-points.

Wikipedia’s page on Scrabble letter distributions is very informative.

Fun fact

Qi is still spelled qi in all three languages.

Ta-ta for now.