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Honestly knowing just the spellings and not the meanings / useage contexts behind the words strikes me as an advantage since you’re as likely to weight “obscure” words as common words in your internal search algorithm. Knowing the language I feel must bias you.

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> internal search algorithm

A cool thing you can do is memorize the words two ways, how it's spelled and also with the letters rearranged alphabetically. That way when you arrange your tiles alphabetically you can just see all the words you've memorized this way that you have or are close to.

Wouldn't that be an enormous timesink though? You basically have to memorize the dictionary... and then memorize it again but in a more complicated way.

Learning pairs (normal, alphabetical) doesn't take anything like twice as long as just learning the normal word. Our brain is funny with associating things, especially if there is some logic to it like always rearranging the characters in the first word alphabetically.

Getting to the top at almost any activity is a massive timesink. Lot to be said for not being too competitive.

I never heard of that before, cool idea.

Exactly what I was thinking. My brain works against me when I’m trying to recall obscure words that fit a pattern when making a limerick or whatnot.

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