: strange, wonderful, foreign, or wild, untamed

[FREMD is one of those rare adjectives that describes itself. Rarely found in dictionaries nowadays, the OED still includes a long entry for FREMD, with this example of the second usage from Chaucer:

“Al this world is blynd In this matere, both fremd and tame.”]

: one of several species of quail found in the U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean

[The BOBWHITE gets its name from the sound of its distinctive call. Have a listen below.]

: a reptile found in New Zealand

[TUATARAS look like lizards but in fact they are not lizards. Known as “living fossils” for their unique traits and lineage, TUATARAS can grow up to 31 inches long and weigh nearly three pounds. TUATARA is originally a Maori name meaning “peaks on the back,” referring to the pronounced ridge along the animal’s spine.  

From Wikipedia: Their dentition, in which two rows of teeth in the upper jaw overlap one row on the lower jaw, is unique among living species.  They are further unusual in having a pronounced photoreceptive eye dubbed the “third eye”, whose current function is a subject of ongoing research, but is thought to be involved in setting circadian and seasonal cycles. They are able to hear, although no external ear is present, and have a number of unique features in their skeleton, some of them apparently evolutionarily retained from fish.]

: adj of a dull, brownish gray color

: v to demand payment for a debt

[Some of us may be familiar with the color DUN (some believe its etymology connects it with the word “dawn”) but the use of DUN as a verb meaning to call for a payment of a debt opens up the word DUNNED and the useful bingo DUNNING. The color DUN is often used in connection with horses.]

: a peanut

[GOOBER is thought to likely come from “guber,” the word for peanut in Gullah. Gullah was a language spoken by slaves in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and Georgia, including the coastal plain and islands. Gullah, also known as Geechee, is heavily based on African loan-words, and “guber” can be traced to the KiKongo (or Bantu) word for peanut, “n’guba.”

: a literary text that is not a novel

[NONNOVEL is a very rare, archaic term. It makes for an interesting Scrabble word, and—as a defining characteristic of something by that which it is not—an interesting idea for a literary movement, one would think. A Romanian-American mathematician and writer, Florentin Smarandache, did title a book of his NonNOVEL.]

: the penis of an animal

[Primarily used in Australia and New Zealand, though it also crops up in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Also occasionally found in the combination “bull pizzle,” denoting a whip made from a bull’s penis, as in Samuel Beckett’s radio play Rough for Radio II.

These days, one is most likely to come across the word in the product Pizzle Sticks, which are dog treats made of dried steer…uh…pizzles.]

: to agonize over inconsequential details

[Probably like NIGGARDLY (meaning “stingy”), NIGGLE traces its roots not from the racial slur but from the Old Norse “hnøggr,” which itself has evolved into the Norwegian “nigla,” both of which also mean “stingy.”]

: a monetary unit of China, also CHIAO

[The JIAO is equal to one-tenth of a YUAN. As a YUAN is currently equal to $0.16 American dollars, a JIAO is worth about a penny or two in American currency, making it another example of a foreign currency more valuable on your Scrabble rack than in your pocket.]

: resembling the sky 

[We find SKYEY used by John Updike in The Witches of Eastwick:

This was September, season of full tides; the marsh between here and the island this afternoon this was a sheet of skyey water flecked by the tips of salt hay turning golden.

“Skyier” is not a word, but SKYING—from the verb “to sky” (to send upwards towards the sky)—is, which is not to be confused with SKIING, the present participle of SKI.]

: a flightless bird of New Zealand, also known as the woodhen

: a mid-afternoon canonical daily prayer period in the traditional Christian liturgy

[Any English speaker would be familiar with NONE as a pronoun (“None of us want to have a rack with seven vowels on it”) but NONE is also a noun, referring to set of prayers said after SEXT, at around 3pm. As such, the usually unthought-of plural NONES is playable in Scrabble.]

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from http://www.chroniclebooks.com/blog/2013/04/09/a-soviet-scrabble-union-10-russian-words-that-score-big-in-scrabble/

April 2013 has not been a great holiday month. Both Easter and vast majority of Passover fell in March, which leaves us with the decidedly less rousing “holidays” of Tax Day, Earth Day, and Arbor Day. (I’ll pause as you stifle a yawn.)

Fortunately, two lesser-known holidays are presently at our doorstep, weird looking and awkward like they’re not sure if they’re invited to the party. Can you see them? One’s dressed as a Russian astronaut, the other as a crossword-based board game.

That’s because April 12 is Russian Cosmonaut Day, which commemorates the day in 1961 that Yuri Gagarian became the first man in space. And April 13 isNational Scrabble Day, observed each year on the birthday of Alfred Mosher Butts, the inventor of Scrabble.

To celebrate, let’s toss these two holidays in a blender and explore some of the most useful Russian-based seven-letter words (“bingos”) in Scrabble.

Note that while these words don’t look like English, they all have been absorbed into the English language and are completely legal Scrabble words. So let’sRUSSIFY your game and vocabulary a little:

• The best seven letters you can start with in Scrabble are IJKMSUZ. They unscramble to form MUZJIKS, the plural of MUZJIK, which was a Russian serf. Today, Russians use muzjik to refer to one another, akin to Americans’ use of the word “dude.” (also MUZHIKS or MOUJIK.)
• KOLKOZY is another high-scoring bingo, though it would necessitate at least one blank tile to make (there’s only on K tile). KOLKOZY (also KOLKHOSY KOLHOSES) is a plural of KOLKOZ (also KOLKHOS and KOLKHOZ), a collective farm in Russia, like the Israeli KIBBUTZ.
• Another outstanding bingo, SOVKHOZ, is a state-owned farm in Russia. It can be pluralized as SOVKOZY or SOVKHOZES.
• SOVIET is playable too, referring to an elected legislative body in a Communist country. SOVIETS works as a bingo.
• A KREMLIN is a Russian citadel, and is another possible bingo. In fact, you can even play KREMLINOLGISTS, who study KREMLINOLOGY.
• A smart muzjik could also land an extra 50 points with SPUTNIK, a Soviet artificial orbiting satellite. Sputnik comes from the Russian for “fellow-traveler.”
• Care to travel through Russia by horse? Consider taking a TROIKA, a Russian carriage pulled by three horses. Troika literally means “threesome,” and later came to refer the 1953 triumvirate of NKVD leaders who briefly ruled the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death.
• Finally, there are words connected to CZARISM, the autocratic (or CZARIST) government, under which a czar—and perhaps his wife, a CZARINA—controls a territory, known as a CZARDOM. (As czar can also be spelt tsar or tzar, we also have TSARISM/TZARISM, TSARIST/TZARIST, TSARINA/TZARINA, andTSARDOM/TZARDOM.)

So happy National Scrabble Day and happy Russian Cosmonaut Day. Here’s to your pursuit of Scrabble tsardom!

: a noontime canonical daily prayer period in the traditional Christian liturgy

[While “sext” as a verb is not yet a Scrabble word (referring to sending a sexually explicit text message), the noun SEXT is playable. SEXT comes from the Latin for the sixth hour of the day after dawn, and is one of the seven daily prayer periods. Wikipedia notes that the noonday praying at SEXT is important because

Noon is the hour when the sun is at its full, it is the image of Divine splendour, the plenitude of God, the time of grace; at the sixth hour Abraham received the three angels, the image of the Trinity; at the sixth hour Adam and Eve ate the fatal apple. We should pray at noon, says St. Ambrose, because that is the time when the Divine light is in its fulness. Origen, St. Augustine, and several others regard this hour as favourable to prayer. Lastly and above all, it was the hour when Christ was nailed to the Cross; this memory excelling all the others left a still visible trace in most of the liturgy of this hour.