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My friend played the 'A' and the 'X' tiles underneath the word REARMICE and I was confused as I didn't believe it was legal to play words alongside other words.

He also stated that he received points for “Ax” twice, and “Ea” once, and since the 'X' tile was on a triple letter square he tripled its points, and then tripled it again because he used it for two words, is this legal?

I assumed that when he put down the 'X' tile to make “Ax” using the 'A' tile from REARMICE his turn was over, but instead he placed another letter.

section of a scramble board as described previously

AncientSwordRage
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xemulas
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  • Whilst not quite a duplicate question you will find your answer here https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/7319/double-movement-in-scrabble?rq=1

    "All tiles played in any one turn must be placed in one row only across, or one column only down the board."

     – StartPlayer Jan 09 '22 at 11:35
  • Thank you for the response. we are playing scrabble, and i did see that post but i couldnt understand what it meant by reading it, i suppose i need an explanation. – xemulas Jan 09 '22 at 12:37
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    if that's a valid play or not depends entirely on if "ea" is considered a valid word. At least https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en-us/tools#dictionary doesn't recognize it. Though Wiktionary does include it, so I guess I'll try to remember to use it the next time I play, though I'm slightly afraid I'll just be shot as a cheater. – ilkkachu Jan 09 '22 at 18:46
  • @ilkkachu You wouldn't get away with it in my house. – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact Jan 09 '22 at 22:33
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    "tripled it again" doesn't read correctly. X counts as 24, twice, but not as 72. Hopefully that's what you mean. ("Ax" counts as 25, "Ax" counts as 25, and "EA" counts as 2, for a total of 52.) – Joe Jan 10 '22 at 00:13
  • @ilkkachu Why is it only valid if ea is a valid word? Those letters were already down as part of an existing word, right? – Kevin Workman Jan 10 '22 at 05:51
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    @KevinWorkman the "EA" running downwards, not the "EA" that's part of the previously existing word. – Chris H Jan 10 '22 at 07:29
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    @ilkkachu The players are supposed to agree on a particular dictionary to use before the game begins. So whether "ea" is a legal play will depend on the dictionary chosen. – Kef Schecter Jan 10 '22 at 13:45
  • @KefSchecter, sure, sure. Mostly I've played in groups where the agreed-upon dictionary is "whatever the other players allow after some argumentation". – ilkkachu Jan 10 '22 at 13:58
  • @ilkkachu So "kwyjibo" counts so long as you can convince the other players it's a real thing? (I can point to it in some unofficial dictionaries, but that doesn't necessarily make it cromulent.) – Darrel Hoffman Jan 10 '22 at 19:54
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    It is not cheating or illegal to play an invalid word. You can play any word that you think your opponents won't challenge. Challenges are made and resolved after the word(s) are played, with the loser losing their turn. A true illegal move (say, placing tiles that aren't adjacent to any existing tiles) is simply not permitted: the player's turn does not end until they make a legal move. – chepner Jan 10 '22 at 21:03
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    @chepner, you should probably post that as an actual answer. – ilkkachu Jan 10 '22 at 21:16
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    Does this answer your question? Are double movement in Scrabble allowed? – Robert Columbia Jan 11 '22 at 03:48

4 Answers4

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This is a perfectly legal move covered by the third point in the rules excerpt below.

https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en-us/rules

New words may be formed by:

  • Adding one or more letters to a word or letters already on the board.

  • Placing a word at right angles to a word already on the board. The new word must use one of the letters already on the board or must add a letter to it. (See Turns 2, 3 and 4 below.)

  • Placing a complete word parallel to a word already played so that adjacent letters also form complete words. (See Turn 5 in the Scoring Examples section below.)

enter image description here

Placing AX, the ones circled in blue. This move creates three words. The X is on a triple letter score. enter image description here

All three words are scored separately with premium values counting for all words.

EA (Red): 1 + 1 = 2
AX (Purple): 1 + 8x3 = 25
AX (Blue): 1 + 8x3 = 25

This gives a total move score of 52.

Sylvester Kruin - try Codidact
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LeppyR64
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    "so that adjacent letters also form complete words" --> "EA" is not a word, thus it is NOT a valid move. Also: you didn't really touch on the scoring part of the question. – Opifex Jan 10 '22 at 07:57
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    @Opifex The question revolves around the legality of playing a word parallel to a word already played, rather than perpendicular, is allowed. Once that is determined legal, the rest of the question is trivial. If the word is not valid then the only should be rejected on that basis, not on the type of play and is therefore outside the scope of the question. – LeppyR64 Jan 10 '22 at 10:30
  • Not true, because it could be argued that the word should only be valid in one direction. Also: the scoring was part of the question and is not trivial. – Opifex Jan 10 '22 at 12:16
  • @Opifex It has not been established that "ea" is not a legal word in this particular game. Many dictionaries don't have this word, but it is a real word (a dialectical word for "river") and will appear in a large enough dictionary. – Kef Schecter Jan 10 '22 at 13:51
  • The question is whether or not this was a legal play. The entire play. Which means that you are responsible for answering the entire question, which is whether the play as a whole is legal. You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of a question are interesting and answer only those parts. Since that’s what you’ve done, this is an incomplete answer and should rightfully be deleted. – KRyan Jan 10 '22 at 19:40
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    Nowhere does the OP challenge the notion of EA being a word, only the idea of playing a word parallel to, rather than perpendicular to, an existing word. Scrabble itself does not mandate any particular dictionary, only that all players agree to a dictionary or wordlist before the game begins. – chepner Jan 10 '22 at 20:51
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    Also, the move is legal, but the words involved are challengeable. – chepner Jan 10 '22 at 20:53
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    This answer is entirely complete; the move is legal. Whether the word(s) formed by the move will survive a challenge under Rule #8 of the linked rules is an entirely separate matter. – chepner Jan 10 '22 at 21:10
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    EA is a word in the sense that it is a continuous, unbroken sequence of letters reading from top to bottom or left to right. Whether it is an acceptable word under the agreed-upon dictionary is subject to a player challenge, but that doesn't make it illegal. – chepner Jan 10 '22 at 21:11
  • The official description of this rule, as three separate cases, has always seemed unnecessarily complicated to me. It can be seen as a single rule: You must place your tiles so that one of the new words formed contains all the new tiles placed (and all new words formed must be valid words). – PLL Jan 11 '22 at 12:50
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    @PLL That definition omits the requirement that at least one tile be adjacent (horizontally or vertically) to a tile already on the board. – chepner Jan 11 '22 at 22:33
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    @Opifex You are allowed to play invalid words in Scrabble, but you risk losing your turn if an opponent challenges it. – Brady Gilg Aug 11 '23 at 17:29
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That is legal. The rules only specify that you place your tiles along the same vertical or horizontal line, and must be adjacent to tiles already on the board in at least one place.

Your friend formed three new words with his play: ax, ax, and ea. If you think any of them are not valid words, you can challenge his turn.

Here is another example of a word AXION played alongside another word TINT:

enter image description here

(Image cropped from https://img.wonderhowto.com/img/91/78/63406678713167/0/master-scrabble-win-every-game.w1456.jpg)

Imagine TINT was already on the board, and AXION is the new word just played next to it. AXION is a completely permissible play because AT, XI (a greek letter), and IN are also words.

The player gets the points for AXION, AT, XI, and IN. The X is on a triple letter, and its points are tripled in every word it is in.

AXION is 1 + 8*3 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 28 points.
AT is 1 + 1 = 2 points.
XI is 8 * 3 + 1 = 25 points.
IN is 1 + 1 = 2 points.

So this example would have been a legal 57 point play.

Your friend should have scored 52 points for his turn by the way, if you accept EA (which might not be a valid word depending on the dictionary you're playing by).

minseong
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    This also nicely explains the correct scoring. What OP describes seems wrong scoring (for correctly laid words). – quarague Jan 09 '22 at 19:57
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    @quarague if "he tripled it again" means he counted it for 3x points in both AX words, then the scoring seems correct. If "he tripled it again" means he did (8×3)×3 then that's wrong. His friend should have won 52 points. – minseong Jan 09 '22 at 21:24
  • Why is it only valid if ea is a valid word? Those letters were already down as part of an existing word, right? By that logic, wouldn't your example move only be valid if axio was a valid word? – Kevin Workman Jan 10 '22 at 05:40
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    @Kevin "EA" is formed as a vertical word. Placing "A" below the "E" of REARMOUSE forms a word "EA". All words formed in turn must be valid for the turn to be valid. – James K Jan 10 '22 at 06:20
  • I'm surprised that any of the dictionaries allowed it. Generally, proper nouns aren't allowed, right? – nick012000 Jan 10 '22 at 11:12
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    @nick012000 ea means river, it's not a proper noun – minseong Jan 10 '22 at 11:13
  • @theonlygusti If you're playing Scrabble in Old English rather than Modern English, maybe. – nick012000 Jan 10 '22 at 11:25
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    @nick012000, Wiktionary marks it as dialectal but in the English dictionary anyway. Still borderline, though. They reference OED there, but I guess we'd need someone with a subscription to tell us if there's more details there. – ilkkachu Jan 10 '22 at 11:59
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    @ilkkachu The OED lists it as "English regional (chiefly northern, Lincolnshire, and East Anglian) after Middle English.", meaning "A river; a body of running water; spec. (in the Fens, frequently in form eau), a drainage canal.". – TripeHound Jan 10 '22 at 12:41
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    @ilkkachu Is it really any more surprising that a dictionary would allow "ea" and "rearmice" than "wo" and "mbaqanga"? There's not really such a thing as "borderline" in such lists - either the editors of a particular dictionary decided to include the word, or they didn't. If you played to the full OED, there would be a lot of archaic and dialectal terms; if you played to a single-volume dictionary like the Concise Oxford, there would be some subset of them that met whatever criteria the editors used. – IMSoP Jan 10 '22 at 14:09
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    The move is legal, period. Once the move is made, it is up to the opponent to challenge the validity of any word formed by a legal move. You can play unrecognized words as long as your opponent doesn't want to risk challenging it. – chepner Jan 10 '22 at 20:56
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    @IMSoP, borderline in that it depends on the dictionaries and rules used. This seems to be gathering rules lawyers now, so it should perhaps be pointed out, as a reminder, that not everyone plays the game as if in a tournament, and with a sanctified dictionary at hand. It's quite possible to play games just for the fun of it, too. – ilkkachu Jan 10 '22 at 21:15
  • @ilkkachu: Words longer than eight letters may represent borderline cases, since most dictionaries that aren't prepared for use as Scrabble word lists make no effort to identify all words that may be used with various suffixes or derived forms such as converting present participles to adjectives by adding "ly", and those that are intended for Scrabble omit words whose stem is longer than eight characters. – supercat Jan 11 '22 at 17:26
  • @chepner what do you mean by "risk"? Is there a penalty for challenging a word that ends up being valid? – Shadow Jan 11 '22 at 22:11
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    Just as the player loses their turn if the challenge is successful, the challenger loses their next turn if the challenge fails. – chepner Jan 11 '22 at 22:14
  • This example is different from the one in the question. Here "AXION" is played perpendicular to "CARROT", using the existing "O". But in the question "AX" is played parallel to "REARM" without reusing any letter. (From other answers the move in the question is legal, I just wanted to point out the difference.) – N. Virgo Jan 11 '22 at 23:38
  • This is a bad example. for the question. In this example the O in Axion is already in play, in the question there is no letter already in play being used as part of the row that tiles are being placed on, just parallell letters that make words, which is what causes the confusion. – Andrew Jan 12 '22 at 15:35
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This is really just an expansion on LeppyR64's answer, which is correct: the move is legal.

Whether any word formed by a legal move is valid under the agreed-upon dictionary is a separate matter. It is perfectly legal to make up a word. It's the responsibility of an opponent to challenge a play under Rule #8 of the official rules if they believe a word formed by the play to be invalid.

If any word so formed is found to be invalid, all letters in played in that turn are removed and the player loses their turn. (Compare to an illegal move, which is treated as if it weren't made and the player must make a legal move.)

If all words so formed are found to be valid, the words are scored and the challenger loses their next turn.

If a play is unchallenged, all words (whether valid or no) are scored.

chepner
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  • No, this is just playing pedantry with Scrabble rules. The rules do not actually ever use the word 'legal'. You're arguing that the topology of the play shown is consistent with the rules, regardless of the fact that the word ('EA') is unacceptable. Whether that is 'legal' or not is quibbling different definitions of 'legal'. Most of us us would say it isn't. – smci Jan 12 '22 at 15:36
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    If you allow players to challenge a word with no consequences if they are wrong, you aren't playing by the rules. Nothing in the rules say you can't play a word not in the dictionary; the rules explicitly provide a procedure for challenging a word that someone plays. – chepner Jan 12 '22 at 15:40
  • if a player repeatedly and intentionally plays illegal words, they're an annoying or nuisance player. You keep dancing around the undefined word 'legal'; you don't get to redefine it. You're making me wonder what the world record for failed challenges in a Scrabble game was. – smci Jan 12 '22 at 15:46
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    I'm not redefining it, and it's doesn't need to be redefined. "Legal" means "according to the rules", and there is no rule against playing a word not in the agreed dictionary. There is a prescribed penalty for doing so and losing a subsequent challenge, nothing more. – chepner Jan 12 '22 at 15:48
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    If a player repeatedly and intentionally plays illegal words, you challenge them, they lose their turns, and they quickly lose. – chepner Jan 12 '22 at 15:49
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    No not necessarily. A player could intentionally play borderline legal words, or words previously illegal, or only known in some countries, in order to bait their opponent into making challenges and forfeiting a turn. We could even construct an AI player that dances around this. It would certainly be vexatious. (Example word: 'LIBLAB') – smci Jan 21 '22 at 16:21
  • That's your opponent using their knowledge of the agreed-upon dictionary (and your presumed ignorance) to their advantage, which again has nothing to do with the legality of the play. – chepner Jan 21 '22 at 16:26
  • Wrong, it often happens in non-tournament play that people from different countries play what they understand to be words. So, you can have players using British, American, Indian, other European etc. versions of English. Trying to call that 'ignorant' is itself ignorance. And that'e before we get to proper nouns. – smci Jan 21 '22 at 16:28
  • I'm not sure what you think I mean by "igorant"; I'm not using it in any pejorative sense, only that the player doesn't know if a word is in the list or not. Maybe the player placing an invalid word isn't aware it's invalid, rather than intentionally betting their opponent doesn't know it's invalid. The point is, part of doing well at Scrabble is knowing the word list better than your opponent(s), which means identifying invalid words is part of the game play, rather than something you eliminate via the rules. – chepner Jan 21 '22 at 16:37
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No. *

As explained in the other answers, the general pattern is fine. I frequently make 50+ point plays this way (6 x 8 + a few extra - (With X there is EX, AX, XI, XU, with J there is JO), even more occasionally with QI or ZA (6 x 10 + a few extra).

However, according to the online official dictionary, EA is not a valid word. Some other dictionaries may include it. AE is a word, but not EA.

* As noted in a comment, SOWPODS includes EA. So if the game is outside US/Canada, or inside US/Canada but chooses to include SOWPODS words, then this is a valid 52 point play.

manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact
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    It depends on the dictionary you're playing by. EA is valid in SOWPODS/CSW/WESPA (international English) play, but not in NASPA (US/North American English). – shoover Jan 10 '22 at 01:31
  • Why is it only valid if ea is a valid word? Those letters were already down as part of an existing word, right? – Kevin Workman Jan 10 '22 at 05:40
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    @KevinWorkman there's "EA" inside the existing word running West to East, but there's also a new "EA" on it's own running North to South as part of the play. – Jontia Jan 10 '22 at 09:13
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    The move is legal. It's up to an opponent to challenge whether EA is a word after the move is complete. An illegal move simply cannot be made; the game does not procede until a legal move is made in its place. – chepner Jan 10 '22 at 20:55
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    I don't feel that a direct statement of no followed by an asterisk stating it would be legal if the word EA is valid. As we don't know what dictionary they are using we can't give an answer based on that but should instead focus on the play being legal if all the newly created words are valid. – Joe W Jan 10 '22 at 21:54
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    @JoeW Whether or not the words formed are valid is irrelevant. There is a rule for challenging invalid words as part of the play; it is not illegal to play them in the first place. – chepner Jan 11 '22 at 22:21
  • @chepner That was my point the play was a legal play with a caveat that the word could be challenged as a legal word. This answer seems to be stating that it is not a legal because "EA" is not a valid word. – Joe W Jan 11 '22 at 22:25
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    Correct: the answer is wrong, asterisk or no. – chepner Jan 11 '22 at 22:27
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    @chepner I disagree, obviously. The word "legal" is not in the official rules. I posit that a challenge is a way of determining that a move was not valid in the first place - i.e., illegal. You posit that there is "legal in terms of placement location" and separately valid/invalid words based on dictionary/challenges. – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact Jan 11 '22 at 22:40
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    @manassehkatz-Moving2Codidact No, it's not. The challenge provides consequences for one of the two players involved: either the play is withdrawn and the player loses their turn, or the play stands and the challenger loses their turn. That is quite different from an attempted play like placing tiles that aren't in contact with existing tiles: there is no challenge involved; it's simply a non-action and the game does not proceed unit the player corrects it. – chepner Jan 12 '22 at 15:41
  • (If you are playing a timed game, then a truly illegal move wastes time, but there's no specific penalty like "lose 5 seconds in addition to the time it takes to correct the move.) – chepner Jan 12 '22 at 18:37