Acronyms & Initialisms

ABSP

Association of British Scrabble Players. A non-profit organisation which looks after the interests of British players. It maintains a rating system to rank players, a tournament calendar with all rated events on it and organises several of the major tournaments including the UK National Scrabble Championship (NSC) and British Matchplay Scrabble Championships (BMSC). The ABSP also selects the English, Welsh and Northern Irish teams for the World Scrabble Championships (WSC) and organises the qualifying criteria for it.

BBB

Basic Boring Bonuses, an abbreviation used primarily on Scrabble Snippetz when doing tournament reports.

BMSC

British Matchplay Scrabble Championships. This is one of the ABSP's annual flagship Scrabble tournaments, it typically takes place over the August Bank Holiday.

ISC

Internet Scrabble Club. A Romanian based website which allows people to play Scrabble in real-time in a variety of languages.

MSA

Mindsports Academy. Created in 2013 by Mindsports International. The Academy offers many training resources including; videos, games, puzzles and top tips. Also organises structured online and live events as well as a participation programme involving stimulating Mindsports such as chess, Scrabble, Magic: The Gathering and Go.

MSI

Mindsports International. In the context of Scrabble, this is a company which ran the World Scrabble Championships (WSC) through Mindsports Academy (MSA), which it created in 2013, until 2019.

NASC

NASC

North American Scrabble Championships.

NSC

National Scrabble Championships. Usually prefixed with the respective country, such as the UK NSC, meaning the UK National Scrabble Championships. The NSC is usually a very important and prestigeous event as it produces the National Champion.

SCT

Scrabble Champions Tournament. This is generally accepted to be equivalent to a WSC (or World Scrabble Championships). It was organised by MSI in 2013 and 2014, when it could not use the WSC name. They reverted back to WSC in 2016.

WESPA

World English-Language Scrabble Player's Association. WESPA can be considered as an association of all of the smaller national associations. It provides an official structure for the international Scrabble community. It supports Associations with internationally recognized rules and a ratings system whilst promoting a global calendar of Scrabble events designed to cater for players of all ages and levels.

WESPAC

WESPA Championship. A large international tournament supported by WESPA taking place every two years, the first one took place in Perth, Australia in 2015.

WSC

World Scrabble Championships. Generally considered to be the most important Scrabble tournament. The first event took place in London, 1991. Then every two years until 2013 when the name changed to the SCT. There was another SCT in 2014. Before the WSC name returned for the next event in 2016. No events have taken place since 2019, with WESPAC now the de facto world championship.

WYSC

World Youth Scrabble Championships. Starting in 2006 the WYSC has been held every year, largely down to Karen Richards' tireless endeavours and generosity. In 2017 some complications arose over the WYSC name when MSI branded its event the WYSC. Subsequently MSI changed this to the Junior World Scrabble Championship with Karen Richards' tournament named the 12th WESPA Youth Cup.

Terms

Aerolith

Aerolith is a web app written by César Del Solar. Its main goal is to provide a fun and fast-paced way to learn words quickly. It is particularly popular among tournament Scrabble players.

Elise

Free crossword game artificial intelligence and analysis tool. Created by CM Street, it offers a number of unique features over similar software. Like Quackle this program could be used to play Scrabble, Clabbers or similar games against an extremely high level computer player. It is no longer maintained.

LeXpert

A freely downloadable word study program developed by Carol Ravichandran. It predated Zyzzyva and was used by most competitive players in the early years of Scrabble. It is no longer maintained, but it is available with the newest word lists.

Maven

Free crossword game artificial intelligence and analysis tool. Developed by Brian Sheppard, considered to be the first really strong computer Scrabble player. It is no longer maintained.

Quackle

Free crossword game artificial intelligence and analysis tool created by Jason Katz-Brown, John O'Laughlin, John Fultz, Matt Liberty and Anand Buddhdev. In essence players use this program to play Scrabble against an extremely high level computer player, and to analyse games or positions.

Scrabble Snippetz

The largest Scrabble Facebook Group started by Nicky Huitson.

Xerafin

A web-based study tool for Scrabble players developed by Chris Lipe.

Zyzzyva

A freely downloadable word study program originally created by Michael Thelen, which can also be used for adjudicating the validity of words in a tournament.