Guest Author - Megan Romer

David Logan, a mathematician from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, took home the glory at the 2005 World Scrabble Championships on Sunday, November 20. He won with a score of 465-426 against Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, an architect from Thailand. On the winning board were words such as qanat, euripi, zobo and ogive.

The World Scrabble Championships are held every two years. They have been going on since 1991. Logan has finished in the top 10 four other times at the worlds. He has also won the U.S. Scrabble Tournament and the Canadian Scrabble Tournament.

The World Scrabble Championships can often be difficult for American and Canadian players. In North American tournament play, the OSPD (Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary) is the book from which all words are taken. Everywhere else in the world, English-language Scrabble words are taken from The Chambers Dictionary, which is chock-full of Shakespearisms, archaic British verb tenses and English, Irish and Scottish slang. The American word list is known as OSPD, the international one as OSW, (Scrabble players call the combined lists "SOWPODS"), and international tournament play uses both.

Therefore, American or Canadian players who wish to compete on an international level must thoroughly familiarize themselves with the international lists. This means learning roughly 40,000 new words. Of course, players from other countries who use OSW exclusively must learn the 20,000 OSPD words as well, but that's only half as many.

Many players who compete at the World Scrabble Championships hardly speak a word of English. They are simply people with mathematical brains who methodically memorize word lists. Not a simple task, especially if you keep in mind that many countries in the world don't even use our alphabet!

Congratulations to Mr. Logan and all of the other champions at the tournament.