I finally read Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, a mixture of memoir and reportage about the competitive Scrabble world. Most of America read it several years ago. I almost did, too, but I’m glad I waited, because my last two years of obsessive online play prepared me to get a lot more out of it.

Fatsis correctly notes that the two most common expressions of casual players are “That’s a word?” and “That can’t be a word!” And then he writes, “To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility.”

A lot of those words are on display in Word Freak. To list just a handful: KAB, PANTOFLE, OUGUIYA, OQUASSA and LAICIZED. (There’s something childishly pleasing about the number of words in all caps throughout.) Many of these words are passed along without definition, since knowing what they mean isn’t really the point, but I did learn, for example, that “EXODOS” means “a concluding dramatic scene.”

If you haven’t read it, you should. You don’t need more than a minor interest in the game to enjoy it, since it revolves around larger-than-life characters. One of those characters is Matt Graham, a stand-up comedian who pops dozens of pills a day to (he thinks) maintain his energy and mental edge. I won a Scrabble board from Graham several years back at a comedy event downtown, where he offered the game to anyone in the audience who could stump him with an anagram. I believe he asked for 10 letters or more. I know from the book that my stumping him was dumb luck, because the letter clusters that he’s capable of anagramming are insane. The letters I gave him were:

AAACEILNORTU

Can you figure it out? Answer after the jump:

AERONAUTICAL