Scrabble Seven-Letter Words

The arithmetic of a bingo

Seven one-point tiles spell a word worth 7. Put it on a double word square and it is 14. Add the bingo and it is 64. That is the whole reason an unremarkable word made of the cheapest letters in the bag routinely beats a clever short play with a J in it — the bonus dwarfs the tiles.

It also means you should sometimes decline a decent play. If you are holding six tiles that look one letter away, scoring 22 now and breaking the rack can cost you 70 next turn. Play four points, keep the shape, and draw.

And it is why the ranking on this page looks upside down. The words at the top of the list are worth the most in tiles; the words that actually win games are usually the cheap ones, because they are the ones an ordinary rack can spell.

Rack management that produces bingos

• Balance. Four consonants, three vowels. Racks that drift to five vowels or six consonants almost never make a word, and 42 of the 98 lettered tiles are vowels, so the drift happens on its own.
• Dump duplicates. Two of the same letter kills more bingos than any single bad tile does.
• Keep the good letters. S, E, R, A, T, I and N combine with almost anything, and Scrabble prices every one of them at a single point — so keeping them costs you nothing this turn.
• Spend the blockers. V, K, W and the second U. A rack with a V in it is a rack playing with six tiles.
• Learn the stems. Six-letter combinations like SATIRE and RETINA make a word with a large fraction of the alphabet — see the bingo stems page.