Seven-letter words never felt so important

John Ortman has spent more than three decades chasing triple-triples.The 45-year-old professional Scrabble player and Roseville resident has tackled the world-famous word game since he was a young boy. Triple-triples are the highest scoring word placement a player can make. Many pros consider Scrabble a religion and achieving a triple-triple is an accomplishment of biblical proportions.Available in 29 languages, the word jumble game is celebrating its 61st birthday this year. The small wooden squares are still going strong.Even though you might not be mingling with "Muzjiks" - worth 128 points and the highest scoring first move word in the game - or opening a container of "benzoxycamphors" anytime soon, learning new and impossible to pronounce or spell words has been good family fun since 1941. It was even Pope John Paul II's favorite pastime.Roseville's resident expert on word building board games, Ortman, has been leading the Roseville Scrabble Club for years. "He loves to play because he's a brainiac," Ortman's wife Marie said. "He loves to analyze things and this is the perfect game for him. He takes his notebooks everywhere to study."A tile-carrying member of the National Scrabble Association, Ortman took ninth place in his division at last year's U.S. Scrabble Open tournament. He has been playing professionally since 2000."The game gained wide popularity in the 1950s," Ortman said. "Tournaments started circulating in the 1980s."Ortman said Stefan Fatsis' book "Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players" also created a new wave of anagrammatic fans in 2001. The book details the lives of Scrabble fans, measuring success one tile at a time.Scrabble, known as Alfapet in Sweden, has created the opportunity for word slingers to have an outlet for their eccentric intellects to discuss strategy and new words."Za," slang for pizza, was one of the more than 4,000 recent additions to the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Currently there are more than 140,000 words in the players' dictionary.Ortman, like many other serious Scrabble players, has memorized every single one.At the national level, some players record each move and word in the games they play on tape or old-fashioned paper notebooks to review and be evaluated later. The mathematic combinations can be staggering.As for high score honors, consider Michael Cresta, a Massachusetts carpenter, who achieved the highest scoring game ever at 830 points. Cresta played "quixotry," worth 365 points. The word has to do with visionary schemes.After that word, "craziest" is the highest-scoring play in NSA Club or Tournament history at 311 points.But consider yourself forewarned: Don't try any of these words, or even the game of Scrabble for that matter, at least not while waiting for a politician to speak in Atwoodville, Conn. It's illegal.- Brad Alexander is a reporter for The Press-Tribune, whose full name scores 78 points as an opening word in Scrabble. (Even though that would be impossible, because is takes 13 letters, and you only start with seven.)