Scrabble facts, pt. 4

On Friday, A-V-P had a post on Scrabble and profanity.  She argued that dirty words “tend to be worth more in Scrabble!”  Sadly, she didn’t specify what they were worth more than, and without a control of any sort, her argument had very little force.  She also only used 7 swears, which is too small a sample to draw any conclusions from.

Well, there happens to be a list of Dirty Srabble words.  And once you figure out the base score for every word in the Scrabble dictionary, it’s just one more step to compare the the dirty ones with the others.

So, are dirty words worth particularly high points in Scrabble? Not really.  The mean base score for the expurgated list is 13.35 points, while the mean for the entire dictionary is 14.47.  The per-letter score is higher for the swears (2.07 versus 1.653), but per-letter score declines pretty steadily as the number of letters increases, and it’s not worth running a two-stage regression to sort this out.  If you can think of better lists of words to compare, I can check that out for you.

Meanwhile, the highest scoring swear word is motherfucking (28 points), followed by schwartzes, schvartzes, and motherfuckers (27).  The lowest scoring swear word is les (3 points).

This is probably it for Scrabble Facts, at least for the time being.