DAILY DIRT: Yo, Scrabble lovers, your goal is to be able to play the word ‘OXYPHENBUTAZONE’

Daily Dirt for Friday, Jan.10, 2025

I always consider it a solid game of Scrabble if I don’t get caught at the end holding the “Q” or “Z” … Welcome to today’s three thoughts that make up Vol. 1,169 of The Daily Dirt.

1. I love to play Scrabble, the word-building game that dates to the 1930s.

And apparently, I’m not alone. According to Mattel, the U.S.-based toy and game manufacturing giant, more than 165 million copies of the game have been sold in 120 countries since 1948. That means there are some a lot of serious games out there.

So what is the word that can produce the highest single-play Scrabble score?

“The word in question is ‘OXYPHENBUTAZONE,’ the name of an anti-inflammatory drug,” writes Bennett Kleinman of interestingfacts.mom. “Since the word is 15 letters long, it’s impossible to have all those tiles in your initial seven-tile hand. This means not only does it require drawing the right set of letters, but also already having placed certain tiles on the board in just the right way.

“Scrabble aficionado Dan Stock calculated that playing ‘OXYPHENBUTAZONE’ could score you 1,778 points. According to his strategy, you’d need to be holding the tiles O, Y, P, B, A, Z, and E. You’d also need to have already placed eight specific tiles on certain squares on a standard 15 x 15 Scrabble board: X, H, E, N, U, T, O, and N.”

Kleinman also reports the following words also would need to be strategically placed on the board: “PACIFYING,” “ELKS,” “REINTERVIEWED,” “RAINWASHING,” “MELIORATIVE,” “ARFS” and “JACULATING.”

“If you managed to recreate that exact scenario, ‘OXYPHENBUTAZONE’ would score you 1,458 points on its own (thanks to all the word score bonuses),” Kleinman wrote. “You’d also get 50 points for playing your entire hand and 270 points from creating seven new words running from left to right: ‘OPACIFYING,’ ‘YELKS,’ ‘PREINTERVIEWED,’ ‘BRAINWASHING,’ ‘AMELIORATIVE,’ ‘ZARFS,’ and ‘EJACULATING’.”

Although Stock was the first person to calculate this strategy, there have been more recent proposals that can theoretically score you as many as 1,784 or 1,786 points with the right placement of “OXYPHENBUTAZONE.” However, these specific circumstances needed for those high scores have never arisen in actual game play to anyone’s knowledge, according to Kleinman.

2. Did you know (Part 242)

• That the overall goal in golf is to actually play less golf.
• That mosquitoes don’t only bite you, they urinate on you while sucking your blood.
• That the man who invented the Frisbee was cremated and turned into a frisbee. (Walter Frederick Morrison, the inventor of the Frisbee, was cremated in 2010 and his ashes were turned into a Frisbee by his family. Wow. Just wow.) 
• That the cigarette lighter was actually invented prior to the match. (The first lighter was invented in 1823, the first successful-friction match in 1826.)
• That an adult laughs on the average of 17 times per day. A pre-schooler laughs an average of 300 to 400 times a day.
• That expiration dates on bottled water are for the bottles, not the water.

3. The following facts should help you win a few bets. You can thank me later.

The number of balls produced each year:

• Golf: 1.2 to 1.5 billion.
• Tennis: 300 to 350 million.
• Soccer: 40 to 50 million.
• Basketball: 15 to 20 million.
• Baseball: 15 to 20 million. (MLB uses 900,000 each season.)
• Football: 5 to 10 million.
• Volleyball: 5 to 8 million.

Steve Thought O’ The Day – I can count on one hand the number of times I have played all seven Scrabble tiles on one turn, and I have been playing the game since the early 1960s.

Steve Eighinger writes daily for Muddy River News. I would whip his ass in Scrabble.