Scrabble (SPA-ENG)

Scrabble

For a whole month, I was thinking about whether to post about this or not. I couldn't decide because I doubted that its practice was considered a sport, but finally, here I am, writing about Scrabble all thanks to the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) dictionary whose meanings of the word sport pushed me to tell myself why it is, like chess for example, which I do not doubt classifying as a sport and one of the best, which trains a part of our physique that we generally forget: the brain.

Last January I read a news item that shocked me, it was related to this game that I have known for many years and that I have played with my family so many times: Argentina was crowned world champion of Scrabble 2024 in the tournament held in Granada, Spain, beating the Mexican team in the final.

I didn't know that it was so widespread to the point of having international tournaments and world championships, I didn't even know that my country was a very strong team, to the point of being consecrated above many other countries in this matter of knowing words and their meaning, it surprised me and made me proud.

Therefore, I began to look for background information to learn about this sport that is not very widespread, almost to the point of just being considered a board game to pass the time.

For those who don't know the game, its objective is simple: form words on a board with the pieces that the player has received, each word formed grants points and the winner is the one who has accumulated the most points.

It is a game that in a team tournament includes strategy, collaboration, and passion for knowing the most words from our extensive dictionary.

The game is so important that the World Cup is called “Sport of the Mind” and the last one was held in Spain in November 2024 where the Argentine team prevailed against fierce rivals, all of them Spanish-speaking since due to language issues, the world tournament is held in three different languages: Spanish, English and French.

Scrabble was born in the United States in 1938 and its inventor was Alfred Mosher Butts who created it as a variant of a previous game he had also created and called Lexiko. After going through several processes that included changing names and rules, it finally began to gain ground towards the end of 1948.

In 1991, the first world championship in English took place in London, the second was held in New York in 1993, and the first international tournament in Spanish was held in Madrid in 1997. Thus, the popularity of the tournament grew. In 2009, the XIII world championship in Spanish was held on Margarita Island, in Venezuela, where Argentina won the title for the first time, an achievement that it repeated in 2010 and 2018 until this recent coronation.

The second meaning of the word sport in the RAE dictionary says the following:

2.m. Recreation, pastime, pleasure, amusement, or physical exercise, usually outdoors.

Although not usually played outdoors, Scrabble fits the definition perfectly. don't you think?