Here’s another way to explore the WWO collection during Women’s History Month: on April Fools Day, 2017 we released the Women Writers Online Scrabble Discovery Interface, an exciting new tool that enhances the texts in Women Writers Online by allowing users to discover the Scrabble® scores for the words in each text. Using cutting-edge XML technologies, this interface excludes non-playable words such as proper nouns, words in dialect, and non-English words.
For example, the highest scoring single word in WWO is “quizzically” from Sarah Green’s 1810 Romance Readers and Romance Writers, but you’d need to use a blank tile, and the word would take more than one turn to play.
The 1808 Woman of Colour has some great high-scoring words: quizzing, tranquilizing, dazzlingly, sympathizing, sympathized, apostrophizing, characterizes, and handkerchief.
If you look at the 1547 Latter Examination of Anne Askew you can really see how it has the highest average score for any text in WWO: quyckeneth, excommunycate, worshyppynges, suffycyentlye, pertycypacyon, and forejudgementes.
On the other end of the scale, Eleanor Davies’s 1646 The Gatehouse Salutation has the lowest average score: its highest-scoring words are judgment, proclaiming, magnificat, powtherd, and expired.
Davies also has your back if you just want a short read—her 1651 The Benediction has a mere 152 words. Or, you could look for the longest text in WWO, Judith Sargent Murray’s 1798 The Gleaner, which has a whopping 15,452 playable words.
Here are a few other of our favorite high-scoring words:
- Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 1653: wizzards, handkerchiefes, buzzing, earthquakes, dizzy, philosophical, lizzard
- Alicia Clarke D’Anvers, Academia: or, the Humours of the University of Oxford, 1691: syncategorematical, handkerchief, whinworms, squeeze, quaffing, coxcombs
- Chloe Russell, The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book, 1800: physiognomy, extraordinary, enterprize, joyful
- Mary Evelyn, Mundus Foppensis: or the Fop Displayed, 1691: pizzld, physiognomy, chyromancy, septizonium, picklocks, metoposcopy
- Sarah Butler, Irish Tales, 1716: infranchizements, hazzarded, handycrafts, windmusick, seraphick
- Catherine Read Williams, Fall River, 1833: unequivocally, handkerchief, pickpockets, rebaptizing, scandalized, pocketbook
- Betsey Stockton, Betsey Stockton’s Journal, 1824–25: quizzing, phosphorescence, unacquainted, blacksmiths, jestingly
If nothing else, these texts show us to remember how useful “handkerchief” can be, especially if you hit a Triple Word Score!
