Collins Dictionaries - BANANAGRAMS®: The Insider Secrets to Help you Become Top Banana!

Monkeys Sip Teas Thats not only a fun way to start a book, its also an anagram of Some Sneaky Tips which is exactly what youll find at the start of The Little Book of BANANAGRAMS! If you play BANANAGRAMS a lot, though, you already know that rearranging letters is only part of the game. You also have to be fast and strategic And you have to know the rules! So heres a brief recap before we look at The Stinky Apes sorry, The Sneaky Tips Rules Empty all 144 letters face-down on the table to form the BUNCH . Depending on the number of players, each person takes between 11 and 21 tiles. Up to four players may take the full 21; five six players take 15 letters Seven or more BANANAGRAMS fans each start with 11 tiles. In all cases, the game begins when a player shouts SPLIT and everyone turns over their tiles as fast as they humanly can! Theres no taking turns you simultaneously race to use your letters in an individual word grid, rearranging them as much as you like. When youre out of letters, you shout PEEL Everyone takes a new tile from the BUNCH , including the person who shouted PEEL .

If you get stuck with a difficult letter, you can say DUMP and return it face-down to the BUNCH But you have to take three new letters in exchange! Once all the tiles in the BUNCH are used, the first player to legitimately use all their letters shouts BANANAS ! and wins! Not Quite Rules If youve ever heard the words Im sorry, I dont make the rules, you probably caught the subtext, I just learn and quote them verbatim! Well, with BANANAGRAMS, we really dont make all the rules. Some of them you have to decide for yourself Nevertheless, here are our thoughts on the grey areas of the game! U.S. and U.K. Spellings In the 1820s, Noah Webster radically reformed the American English language, changing dozens of the U.K.s word spellings for a variety of reasons. And while his suggested spelling of machine masheen didnt find a home on either side of the Atlantic, many of his other changes survive to this day. In fact, the differences between British and American English now cause what we imagine to be about 80% of all word-game arguments! If you plan to keep playing BANANAGRAMS with friends, though, you can avoid a debate by agreeing whats acceptable before you start.

And while you could opt to play exclusively with U.S. or U.K. spellings, the strategically shrewd thing to do is to persuade others to allow both. This allows you to play many Ss and Zs interchangeably, and for the letter U to slip in and out of words such as COLOR , GLAMOR , and FLAVOR as required! Of course, your opponents are able to do the same thing the question is: will they think to do so?! See the section on U.S. / U.K. language for more Sneaky Tips Abbreviations, Acronyms and Text Speak A friend of ours was once told to remove from a long, wordy report all the confusing TLA s.

Unfortunately, no one had any idea what the boss meant by TLA s! When someone plucked up the nerve to ask, it turned out to mean Three Letter Abbreviations! Well, most abbreviations, acronyms, and text speak are disallowed in BANANAGRAMS unless theyve come into common use as colloquialisms or shortened forms. For example, AD for advertisement is okay; LOL for Laugh Out Loud / Lots Of Love is not. AB for an abdominal muscle is okay; PLS for please is not. The best thing to do is remember the old speechwriters adage: If in doubt, leave it out. Defining Moments The question of definitions often comes up in BANANAGRAMS when one player challenges another over a suspicious-looking word in their grid. If a word is clearly recognizable to other players, the decent thing to do is to allow it even if the person who used it isnt entirely sure what it means.

That said, your intention should be to know the definition of words youre playing And if you plan to use the obscure words in this book, you really should learn their meanings! Some of them look like absolute nonsense to the untrained eye. In the spirit of good sportsmanship, though, we suggest that, even if a word no one knows ends up in a grid by mistake but when checked appears in a dictionary, you allow it. Rather than grumble when it happens to us, we simply make a note of the new word, its meaning and the dictionary its in for future reference. Table Manners One obscure thing that you might want to settle ahead of the game is whether or not players are allowing symbols that appear in the Periodic Table of Elements. Here at BANANAGRAMS HQ, we feel that doing so takes things a bit far. If you disagree, then it opens the game up to some truly terrific letter combos But its not for us sorry! With all this in mind, youll find yourself ready to play on your own terms But youll find your actual game is much improved if you start using The Sneaky Tips at every stage of the game Its not just about clever words.

So lets start at the beginning The Bit at the Back of the Book Some people have a way with words, and other people Oh uh not have way. So says comedian, actor, musician and writer Steve Martin. He does have a way with words, of course! And here, in the much-trailed Bit at the Back of the Book, well offer up a word-related smorgasbord that shows why so many people who do have a way with words find them frolicsome, fun and fascinating. To help with your BANANAGRAMS game theres a ready reckoner that as promised shows which of the two-letter words we gave you earlier can instantly convert to new words by adding one tile to their fronts or backs Theres also an absolutely enormous list that defines those three-letter words. And for those only just falling in love with language, well show a few of the ways that words can be playful! But first, the answer to what must be one of the questions were asked most-often Why are Some Words Words and Some Words Not Words? CORPUS , Wurfing & GLOSS . Sounds exactly like the name of an accountancy firm, doesnt it? In fact, these three words are going to help answer that question In short, what it really comes down to is somebodys best guess and personal taste.

Wurfing Even though theyre from the same Roald Dahl book, SCRUMDIDDLYUMPTIOUS and snozzcumber have different fates. SCRUMDIDDLYUMPTIOUS most definitely is in at least one dictionary but we cant find snozzcumber in any And yet we know for a fact that snozzcumber very nearly was an entry! So too was the suggested noun wurfing, a proposed portmanteau word meaning to surf online while at work. To put that another way, SCRUMDIDDLYUMPTIOUS is playable, but snozzcumber and wurfing arent simply because none of the major dictionaries GLOSSED them Glossed? Yes, glossed! Ever wondered why a list of jargon at the back of a book is called a GLOSSARY ? Well, the word comes from the verb GLOSS meaning to insert a word as an explanation. When dictionary editors put a new word in a dictionary, they say its been glossed. Glossing is complicated, though. Just for a moment, try to imagine the total number of words that are written in English both online and off And when we say words, we mean all words: medical terms, industry jargon, dialect phrases, spelling errors, slang, foreign words with no English equivalent, made-up-in-the-moment words Think of even a fraction of what people write and youll quickly appreciate that such a vast number of words could never really be glossed in a dictionary.

Consider too the short-lasting popularity of some words like the really awful GRRRL and you might even agree that not everything that could be glossed should be: editors need to choose carefully the locutions that forever earn a place in their dictionaries. And the simplest way to explain how they do it is to say that it relates to the frequency and duration of a words use in everyday English But how on earth do they measure these things? Why, with a corpus of course! Corpus So what the heck is a corpus? In this context its a formal term for a publishers database of words. Its made up using software that analyzes the use of up to around 150 million words a month. New words or new meanings for existing words are considered by a team of editors who decide if the word has merit, will be around for a long time and is common enough to warrant an entry. In the end its usually down to one persons best guess And so we end up with surprising variation across dictionaries even though they all set out to do much the same thing. Snozzcumber just doesnt show up in everyday English enough to warrant an entry SCRUMDIDDLYUMPTIOUS does.