Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To scrape or grope about frenetically with the hands.
- v. To struggle by or as if by scraping or groping.
- v. To climb with scrambling, disorderly haste; clamber.
- v. To make hasty, disordered markings; scribble.
- v. To make or obtain by scraping together hastily.
- v. To scribble on or over.
- n. The act or an instance of scrabbling.
- n. A scribble; a doodle.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To scrape, scratch, or paw with the hands; move along on the hands and knees; crawl; scramble: as, to scrabble up a cliff or a tree.
- To scramble or struggle to catch something.
- To make irregular, crooked, or unmeaning marks; scrawl; scribble.
- To scrape or gather hastily: with up, together, or the like.
- n. A moving on the hands and knees; a scramble.
Wiktionary
- v. To scrape or scratch powerfully with hands or claws.
- v. intransitive To move something about by making rapid movements back and forth with the hands or paws.
- v. To scribble.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To scrape, paw, or scratch with the hands; to proceed by clawing with the hands and feet; to scramble.
- v. To make irregular, crooked, or unmeaning marks; to scribble; to scrawl.
- v. To mark with irregular lines or letters; to scribble.
- n. The act of scrabbling; a moving upon the hands and knees; a scramble; also, a scribble.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an aimless drawing
- n. a board game in which words are formed from letters in patterns similar to a crossword puzzle; each letter has a value and those values are used to score the game
- v. feel searchingly
- v. write down quickly without much attention to detail
Etymologies
- Dutch schrabbelen, from Middle Dutch, frequentative of schrabben, to scrape. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“But have you ever been able to share your love for a fellow word nerd in scrabble talk?”
“No wait it's scrabble rules i've won the states with the most states that have more value in scrabble rules 'Idiots.”
“A game of scrabble is underway, and there is much laughter and good feeling here in the relative quiet and isolation of the Jakes salt-water pool area.”
Calabash–Second Day and Night : Kwame Dawes : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation
“Scrabble for the iPad features all the joy and wonder of the classic word scrabble game, with the ability to play alone or with friends via Facebook or the new Party Play mode.”
“In fact, the scrabble is the sound of parents who trusted the system's '' we give your child all the education it needs '', then realised too late half the kids in the class had been on seven hours 'coaching a week since kindy.”
“It might also have to do with having been the underdog for so long so that women kind of scrabble in these different jobs.”
“Sit around a lot playing computer games such as scrabble or casino games while thinking about what constructive things you should be doing.”
“A madman would be more likely to hammer than to "scrabble" on the great double-leaved gate.”
“They did the impossible again, when they assembled a rag-tag scrabble of an army under an inexperienced commanding general and proceeded to defeat the world’s greatest military power of the time in a long and arduous struggle against guns, weather, poverty and demoralization, for the prize of freedom and the opportunity to start anew.”
“He says that he doesn't even know if he can spell 'scrabble'.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘scrabble’.
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CCle
all those wonderful Britsy words that end with a double consonant followed by 'le'
doddle, bobble, dibble, whiffle, waffle, diddle, piddle, jiggle, straggle, boggle, fiddle, skeedaddle and 125 more...
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Word Games
All the wonderful games I'm sure all of you love to play.
scrabble, pictionary, cryptogram, cross word puzzle, upwords, bethump'd, hangman, jotto, mornington crescent, anagrams, boggle, balderdash and 1 more...
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All Things Scrabble
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wingblossom's Words
flicker, wrinkle, solipsism, tea, aurora, lilt, burnt, crescent, gale, pocket, ephemeral, candied and 136 more...
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summerwing's Words
proctosigmoidoscopy, horrendous, cichlid, implode, nostalgic, firmament, elucidate, quintet, rhombus, mack, pithy, rambunctious and 304 more...
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reginaterra's Words
purl, blow, squish, andean, generality, adaptation, lush, pack, filter, acquiesce, abstraction, sweet and 508 more...
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eggplantia5's Words
scintillate, marvel, cranberry, oscillate, triumph, bamboozle, grimace, magical, book, hexagon, cipher, compendium and 2727 more...
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kat's words
ecumenical, cacophony, clatter, marimba, bamboo, saffron, slice, mercurial, pomegranate, cranky, slipshod, scritch and 511 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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aliko's Words
deli, turkey, bodrum, deniz, sunny, seks, tatil, hava, zeeman, captain, kapitein, kaptan and 256 more...
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elizacole's Words
isomorphic, endemic, tmesis, fillip, antedate, avoirdupois, jeremiad, hypnagogic, antediluvian, fuck, reification, raconteur and 251 more...
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cutting words
sarcasm, sarx, sarcoptic, syssarcosis, shrew, shrewd, screed, scred, shroud, scroll, scrod, scrutiny and 326 more...
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Samme's Words
soliloquy, meander, creativity, magic, discovery, happiness, empowerment, abundance, [magnificent], iridescent, artistic, magical and 694 more...
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Words that Grate
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ginnylev's Words
neuroplasticity, repudiate, scintilla, ruminate, tautology, ombudsman, exigent, filibuster, grace, ambidextrous, amends, disclosure and 623 more...
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S is for Sweater Puppy
My S Words
secret agent, sweater puppy, skivvies, soda jerk, surly, space madness, sad sack, sadsack, scoundrel, scrabble, shaken teddy bear..., saucy and 181 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for scrabble.
ruzuzu I've been tagging capital letters with the points they're worth and the number of times they occur in the set of Scrabble tiles (for English), but I'm wondering whether there's a more useful way to categorize them here on Wordnik. Has someone figured it out already? I've seen a couple of lists of two-letter words (and even banned words). Any suggestions? Jan 2, 2010
oroboros See lexulous.com for an online scrabble-type game. It used to be named Scrabulous and was available on Facebook (it was removed after Hasbro brought suit--later dropped--against the creators.) Mar 14, 2009
oroboros A sentence constructed with the 100 letter-tiles of Scrabble:
COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY, NOT EULOGIZE, CAESAR; IF EVIL LIVES ON, BEQUEATHING INJURY, GOOD OFT EXPIRES: A PALSIED, AWKWARD DEATH!
From futilitycloset.com Mar 14, 2009
oroboros Using all 100 tiles of a Scrabble set (and designating the blanks as particular letters), create a list of words so that the list is as short as possible.
FIBS
JOKERS
WOWING
UNEXpOSED
VIVIPERFUSION
ZOOGEOGRAPHICaLLY
QUADRATOMANDIBULAR
ETHYLENEDIAMINETETRAACETATE
From LOGOLOG. Jun 1, 2008
mollusque Let me count the ways... Mar 4, 2008
cricket Gawd, mollusque, how do you remember that?! Mar 4, 2008
mollusque Mine was paraquat. The q was on the board and I hit a triple-triple through it. Jan 31, 2008
sarra But I bet she survived!
groan
A couple that spring to mind are jungly and anaerobe. Jan 31, 2008
kewpid I once played tequila. Jan 31, 2008
yarb My best scrabble word was vixenish. Post your best (i.e. those you're most proud of) scrabble words here. Nov 30, 2007