A Dabble of Scrabble

Saturday, April 26, 2025 | 10:00 a.m.

$0 | 925 13th St. NW, Entrance on K Street

Enjoy a dabble of Scrabble! Planet Word is hosting the 2025 North American School Scrabble Championship. Museum visitors can drop by the Friedman Family Auditorium to check out the competition livestream, engage in pop-up-talks from Scrabble experts, and flex those word wits in an informal game of Scrabble.

For more details about the North American School Scrabble Championship and guest programming, visit LetsPlayScrabble.com and reserve your pass to Planet Word.

Saturday Activities:

A Century of Wordplay: Word Games and Competitions from 1925 to 2025 | Friedman Family Auditorium | 10:45 a.m.
One hundred years ago, language lovers started playing with words in new ways. In 1925, the crossword craze hit its peak, as bookstores struggled to keep up with the demand for dictionaries and thesauruses from puzzle solvers. That same year, the first national spelling bee was held in Washington, D.C., with students competing over mastery of the dictionary. Join Ben Zimmer for a presentation about how word-based pastimes from Scrabble to Wordle have turned the lexicon into a source of fun and competition.

Ben Zimmer is a linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut. He has served as a language columnist for the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the recipient of the inaugural Linguistics Journalism Award from the Linguistic Society of America. As chair of the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society, he oversees the society’s Word of the Year proceedings. He also serves as the first-ever Vocabulary Judge for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The Scrabble Dictionary — and Other Dictionaries | Friedman Family Auditorium | 3:20 p.m.
In 1978, Merriam-Webster published the first edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary — a collection of nearly 100,000 words to standardize tournament play and settle disputes at home. Debate over what words should be playable in the game hasn’t stopped since. Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis talks with Ben Zimmer about the controversial half-century of Scrabble lexicons and the broader subculture of the dictionary.

Stefan Fatsis is the author of the New York Times bestseller Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players. His new book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, will be published in October by Grove Atlantic. Stefan is also the author of A Few Seconds of Panic (about life in the NFL) and Wild and Outside (about minor league baseball). In a four-decade journalism career, he has written and talked for The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Slate, and many other outlets.

Copies of Word Freak will be available for purchase in the Planet Word gift shop. Stefan will be happy to sign books after the talk.

Scrabble Free Play | Classroom A | All Day