Two-person teams of junior wordsmiths from grades five to eight will compete in this national championship, navigating the spelling-based board game created in 1938 by an architect (16 points, plus 50 for clearing the slate) named Alfred Butts. The School scrabble (14) Program was launched in 1991 to help American students improve their lexicons (17) and teamwork (17). For those returning players who made a terrible mess — in higher-scoring terms, a soqquadro (18) — of last year’s championship and are looking to redeem their vanquishing (27), they’ll have to shoot high: the record for a single word (including double and triple-word scores) is 392 points for caziques by Dr. Saladin Karl Khoshnaw in April 1982. The word means aboriginal chiefs in the West Indies and parts of America.
