It’s the Halloween season, and you are probably seeing your neighbors putting up artificial cobwebs on their front porches and hanging sinister-looking bats on their exterior walls. Carved pumpkins, jack o’ lanterns and morbid decorations are probably being hung as of the moment. That being said, you go inside your house, thinking of playing online Scrabble. As you’re practicing and using a word finder, you unconsciously form the word “cemetery” on your rack. Well hey, it’s nearly Halloween right? Maybe it’s time to learn a few words and terminologies [Tweet Me!] associated with this tradition, and use them in one of your games.
Macabre – a fitting term to describe the season
Halloween is definitely a weird season: everyone seems to appreciate ghastly-looking and terrifying characters, like witches, zombies, skeletons and all sorts of undead beings and vampires (the real ones, not the ones in Twilight: those are fairies). Everything you see during Halloween is macabre, meaning anything that resembles death or something that is gruesome, horrifying and shocking.
In Scrabble, macabre will only garner 13 points, but if you turn it into a bingo word, you’ll get 63 words flat, and more if you place it on a bonus square. It’s definitely a macabre way to knock your opponent off.
Bewitch – cast a spell
Although casting spells is associated with fairies nowadays, the real protagonists are actually witches – ugly, disfigured, crooked nosed and broomstick-flying women who happen to be dark magic practitioners. Although pop culture has made them rather attractive (just look up fan art and Victoria Frances), they are mostly seen as they are in fairy tales: ugly and evil, not counting Snow White’s stepmother. To bewitch is to cast a spell on or gain control of someone through magic. In a lighter sense, it could also mean to enchant or delight someone, like to charm or fascinate.
In Scrabble, this word garners a base score of 17 – 67 if it’s a bingo word. If you get a lot of points by playing this word, your opponent will certainly be bewitched by you.
Monster – huge and/or horrifying
Not all monsters are inherently evil: it’s just that they’re huge and terrifying, so people perceive them to be. You will definitely see a number of people wearing monstrous costumes this Halloween, depicting fictional, imaginary, and pop culture beings. Well-known monsters include: Frankenstein, Chimeras, the Minotaur, Medusa, Dragons, the Leviathan, Behemoths, Werewolves (not that Twilight garbage again), Scylla and Charybdis, Godzilla and the Ctulhu. Surely, you may want to consider the above mentioned monsters as an inspiration for your Halloween costume.
This word only dishes out nine points in Scrabble, but due to it being a potential bingo word, you could give yourself 59 points and even more. You’ll definitely appear like a monster in the game, rampaging the board and terrifying your opponent into submission.
Other notable words include cauldron (where witches brew potions), ghoulish, fantasy, frighten, horrendous and haunted. Regardless of your choices, try to use these words to your advantage – you would want to spread the Halloween “cheer” to your opponents!
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