AARGHH! You won't believe these absurd Scrabble phonies!

Ever experienced a lot of AEROSHIFT on a flight, eaten a delicious NUTCAKE, or been UNDERTIPPED for service? I guarantee you you haven't... since none of these are real things!
Check out these and many other hilarious and brilliantly creative phonies (including a single fake word that got by THREE different champions) in this video!
Chloe's crazy comeback: • A truly MIRACULOUS Scr...
Matt Canik's legendary phonies: • LEGENDARY phonies feat...
Matthew Tunnicliffe's best phonies: • 5 OUTRAGEOUS nonwords ...
Josh Sokol's phony masterpieces: • The legendary phonies ...

[@mackmeller]

Hey Guys! It's been noticed that there's a typo at 6:54 -- I have myself phonied with TSOORISS* on the overlay, it should be TSORRISS. Thanks very much to Richard for catching this, and apologies for causing even more confusion haha!

[@humbertocruz6214]

After this video Jackson won't be able to get away with his phony a fourth time!

[@mackmeller]

You never know!

[@AmaranthRBY]

lol the TSORRIS saga is phenomenal

[@mackmeller]

I know right? I'll see if I can find more of these

[@johnwilder4789]

With the ARGH variants, it helps if you can remember that you can hook your way from 4->5 (A)ARGH, or 6->7 AARRGH(H), but no way to hook from 5->6.

[@mackmeller]

AARRGH, I should've thought of that! :)

[@Firefly256]

I think knowing that OVERTIP is valid may have factored into playing UNDERTIP, like you give a very small tip Fun fact: undertip is not red-lined on my device and has a definition in Oxford Languages, the Google's English Dictionary

[@onzie9]

Seeing TSORRIS so many times reminded me of the time one player won all four games of an early bird tourney and played FANJET in every game.

[@galoomba5559]

At least that's not a phony

[@axcertypo]

Wow, had no clue he got away with TSORRIS* more than once. Often we misremember whether words that stayed on the board were phony or not, and that encourages multiple transgressions. You could be certain that TSORRIS* is invalid a year after seeing it played, and then think it is valid again a few years later. More deep dives into hilarious phonies, please!

[@manaphylv100]

I think the funniest bingo I've played had to be YRAVISHED, from the Y and through the E - and the crazy part is that word is not even a phony (in SOWPODS/CSW)! I had other Es to play RAVISHED through, but that one was just hilarious. There was also YTHUNDERED, but not as a bingo since I played THUNDER first to set myself up. I don't even know how to set it up as a bingo - I guess you'll have to play RED in a corner first...

[@ThatRaisinTho]

I recently played “vore,” a word I wish I didn’t know the meaning of. My opponent let it stay on the board. I wasn’t surprised to later learn that it isn’t a valid scrabble word.

[@hiimemily]

If the next revision of the dictionary doesn't include "vore", a very specific group of people are going to riot.

[@ThatRaisinTho]

@@hiimemily I was playing against my dad, I’m glad he didn’t look it up and ask me why I knew the word lmao

[@hiimemily]

@@ThatRaisinTho oh _no_ lmao

[@glowstonelovepad9294]

My opponent once played ZFOOT by hooking my play of FOOT with a Z. I challenged it, and my opponent said that it's an archaic word, with a similar origin to "zounds" (which is short for "God's wounds") and "gadzooks" (which is short for "God's hooks"): "zfoot" is short for "God's foot". However, ZFOOT is not in the Scrabble dictionary, so I won the chhalenge.

[@BrettMKW]

INTREPID was better but she also had a 9 of REPRINTED!

[@mackmeller]

Ah very nice!

[@Renbeaudach]

7:07 thing to remember here is that there are no valid double-R spellings! Also reminds me of the confusion you can have with all the 'JIN' variants, JINN, JINNI, JINNEE, DJINN, DJINNI but not DJINNEE... would be surprised if that one hasn't turned up as a played phony before

[@mackmeller]

Yep for sure, and also which JIN variants take Ss. The way to remember that is "6-letter JINs don't take Ss" -- JINNEES* and DJINNIS* but the other ones all take an S

[@jellomochas]

TSORRISS is valid (and not TSOORISS*)

[@Renbeaudach]

ah good catch, so no longer quite so easy to remember which are invalid l0l

[@squadxzo]

Really fun episode this one. Showing that words with multiple spelling even trips up the best.

[@bearfinn]

How dare you double phony bingos!? 😂 What a feat!

[@skylerl8907]

How do you discover all spelling variations of a particular word? TSOORIS for example has a bunch. And second, how do you know when to dig for spelling variations? In other words I would have never known to look for spelling variations of TSOORIS if nobody told me they existed

[@mackmeller]

One way that you can often discover them (other than by having studied them all) is by looking at definitions on Zyzzyva -- for instance TSOORIS is defined as "tsuris (a series of misfortunes)," so that tells you immediately that TSOORIS is a variant spelling of TSURIS. That might lead you to believe there are even more so you could do a pattern search for TS*R*S and you'd come up with a bunch of others

[@mpeterll]

There are a few times during this video when you show fewer than 7 tiles on a player's rack while there are still tiles in the bag. How does this happen?

[@mackmeller]

That's because of partial racks -- often one player annotates the game with their racks but doesn't know what their opponent has so they just list a partial rack containing whatever tiles the opponent plays

[@mpeterll]

@@mackmeller Okay. That makes sense. I was wondering if there was some weird rule that I didn't know about.

[@richards31415]

6:54 has a typo, it should be TSORRISS. I got away with a pretty cool phony in a recent tourney - DHOOTY* (DHOTI, DHOOTIE, DHOOLY are valid)

[@mackmeller]

Dangit. Thanks very much Richard for catching this... I'll pin it so others don't get confused