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A.Word.A.Day--eagre

eagre (EE-guhr) noun

A high tidal wave rushing upstream into an estuary. Also known as a tidal bore.

[Of obscure origin.]

"A few jet-skiers attempted to jump over the high waves while paddlers in longboats tried to outrace the onrushing eagres." Batang Lupar Challenges Visitors to Tame Its Bores, New Straits Times-Management Times (Malaysia), May 8, 2001.

"They wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful Eagre, come up like a hungry monster ..." George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

All I really needed to know about languages, I learned from Scrabble - a W is worth ten points in French Scrabble. Guess there aren't very many French words with a W in them. Then there's the Polish version, where Z is worth a single point. Wonder why... In German Scrabble, the rules once required players to pick up eight tiles instead of the usual seven. Which language has the longest words on average?

Back to English Scrabble. There are many ways to improve one's score, from learning two-letter words such as "aa", to memorizing the number of tiles for each letter of the alphabet. Here's a little trick you may want to try some time: play words that appear to be misspellings of popular words.

This week's AWAD features words that appear to be everyday words incorrectly spelled. Think you can put them to good use in a game of Scrabble? Here's a parting quiz: what number, when spelled out, has a Scrabble score equal to that number? -Anu

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