Friday, January 17, 2025

Question: What’s the highest-scoring word possible in Scrabble?

Answer: In theory, it’s possible to score more than 1,700 points with a single word, though that requires an extremely unlikely set of circumstances. The word in question is “Oxyphenbutazone,” the name of an anti-inflammatory drug. The word is 15 letters long, so having all those tiles in your initial seven-tile hand is impossible. This means it not only requires drawing the right set of letters, but already having certain tiles placed on the board in just the right way.

Scrabble aficionados calculate that playing “OXYPHENBUTAZONE” could score you 1,778 points in this way: You’d need to be holding the tiles O, Y, P, B, A, Z, and E. You’d also need to have eight specific tiles placed on certain squares on a standard 15 x 15 Scrabble board: X, H, E, N, U, T, O, and N. The following words also would need to be strategically placed on the board: “PACIFYING,” “ELKS,” “REINTERVIEWED,” “RAINWASHING,” “MELIORATIVE,” “ARFS,” and “JACULATING.” Here’s an image of what the 1,778-point word would look like on the board if this ever actually happened. There’s no record that it ever has.