Scrabble, the Board Game, has been Referenced by...
- A strip in Calvin and Hobbes has both characters playing the most outrageous words and getting ridiculously high scores from them. Another has Calvin spelling only two-letter words like "be" (complaining that he lacks vowels on his rack) whereas Hobbes wins big with words like "nucleoplasm".
- Five Nights at Freddy's Troll Palace
. The animatronics (with the exception of Foxy, apparently) just want to play a game of Scrabble with the security guard. - The title of the fanfic We Should Have Just Played Scrabble.
- Flushed Away: When the villains get a tipoff about where the heroes are going Spike exclaims "Bingo!", and Whitey replies with "Scrabble!" at that.
- Charlie's Angels (2000): Dylan and Eric Knox were playing Scrabble at one point on their evening. The next morning, Dylan spells out "ENEMY" when The Dragon shows up, not knowing that Eric himself was the Big Bad.
- Foul Play: Old ladies are seen playing through a window as the main characters pass by.[Ethel and Elsie are playing Scrabble. Ethel has just put down the letters "fucker", to which Elsie has added "muther" at the beginning]Ethel: Wait, Elsie. I think you're wrong. I think you spell that word with a hyphen.
- Heavenly Creatures: Pauline spells out the word PUTRID.
- Innerspace has Martin Short's character attempting to watch the game show (during a Sprint) to calm himself down, only for the shrunken guy inside him (long story) to send a pulse out that blows up the TV.
- Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004): Near the beginning, Klaus and Violet can be seen playing it - Too bad Sonny's been gnawing on the tiles.
- Sneakers. The protagonists use Scrabble tiles to work out the Significant Anagram.
- The movie Word Wars covers the world of competitive Scrabble.
- In her memoir Bossypants, Tina Fey says that her "proudest moment as a child" was beating her uncle at Scrabble with the word "farting".
- In one of the Myth-O-Mania books, "Hit The Road, Helen", Persephone and Hades play this. The second game has Hades playing war words since this mind is worrying about the "Trojan War".
- In the Discworld book Jingo, Leonard of Quirm invents Discworld's equivalent of Scrabble, which he, of course, calls The Make Words With Tiles That Have Been All Mixed Up Game. The one game of it that is played is between him, Colon, Nobby and Vetinari. Nobby only gets three points because all the words he wants to make are rude and Colon won't let him use them. Meanwhile, Vetinari manages to win by extending "avoid" into "unavoidable" and onto "this Three Times Ye Value Of Ye Whole Word square."
- Non-Fiction book Word Freak covers the world of competitive Scrabble.
- One episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown had a member of Dictionary Corner discuss a Scrabble variant entitled "Cult", which involved "convincing the other player" that the nonsense words as seen in a picture (in which the center star space isn't even used'') had actual definitions and were legal to play.note
- The end of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "Repairs" has most of Coulson's team playing a game, though the only move shown is when Simmons makes the word aglet.
- In ALF, Alf spells out "QUIDNUNC". The rest of the players challenge him but they later learn that it is an actual word (one who enjoys gossip). Alf takes this up a notch by using his extra turn to spell out "QUIDNUNCLE".
- The Americans: When Gabriel becomes Elizabeth and Phillip's handler again in Season 3, he often plays Scrabble with them.
- Richard Castle from Castle, naturally, is a master at Scrabble, and always wins every game. Until Beckett comes and utterly humilliates him.
- Le cœur a ses raisons has a scene during which Criquette and Brett play Scrabble together. Not only do they use utterly obvious Scrabble Babble (wqt, ffiffu, txtxtx, etc, which are suspiciously all nocturnal aquatic animals), they place the tiles anarchically over the board.
- In Cousin Skeeter, Skeeter spells out "grzplfx".
- In CSI episode "Bad Words" a competitive Scrabble player is found dead with tiles in his mouth; it's discovered that he was killed after infuriating his opponent. He played a phony (EXVIN; "a wine aficionado who no longer drinks"), and then challenged his opponent for pluralizing it.
- In the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode "Car Periscope", Larry plays Scrabble with an elderly man, who shocks him by putting down "coon".
- Steve and Alex Keaton spend a whole episode Family Ties playing Scrabble, as they use increasingly hilarious strategies and questionable words to try to get an advantage, such as Alex hoarding U's to prevent anyone from getting rid of a Q.
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent tries to teach Scrabble to a cave man when he and Ford get trapped in the distant past. note
- In Little Britain, hypnotist Kenny Craig plays Scrabble with his mother. He adds a Y to his mother's "cupboard", making the word "cupboardy", which he says means, er, cupboard-like.
- In NUMB3RS, it is mentioned that Charlie is a terrible speller and his father gets the game in the first season finale after a game of chess that Charlie lost due to a misspelling of "Anomaly".
- In Red Dwarf, Cat plays "Jozxyqk" in a game against Lister. He insists it's a cat word, defined as the sound people make when they get their sexual organs trapped in things. He's not sure if it's in the dictionary, but it would be if you were reading it in the nude and you closed the book too quickly.
- In The Sopranos, Meadow is playing with Jackie Jr. He complains that she's not allowed to play "Spanish words". The word Meadow played was "oblique", which he pronounces "ob-lik-ay".
- That '70s Show: Red and Kitty are playing Scrabble with their neighbors, Bob and Midge. Red has recently discovered that Bob is bald and wears a wig, and he has "QBALL" on his rack, while Kitty has "A BAD RUG" on hers. Meanwhile, Midge has "ZYGOTE" and sheepishly admits she's got nothing.
- In Two and a Half Men, Alan plays online Scrabble and has played the actual game with Rose, Chelsea and one of Jake's teachers.Chelsea: Wow. You really take this seriously, don't you?Alan: It's Like I Always Say: The losers finish with a rack full of tiles.
- Young Sheldon: In "Stuffed Animals and a Sweet Southern Syzygy", Adult Sheldon says that "syzygy" is an excellent word to play in Scrabble. Though he neglects to mention that Scrabble only comes with two Y tiles, so you'd have to use a blank tile (worth zero points). But that word still gives you a guaranteed 21 points.
- Our Miss Brooks: In the cinematic series finale, Miss Brooks and Lawrence Nolan play a game of Scrabble aboard the Paradise, Nolan's yacht. Not surprising, the board is plainly the deluxe edition, with built-in turntable.
- How It Should Have Ended: In How Saw Should Have Ended, Billy the puppet asks one of his victims if she would like to play Scrabble with him.
- In the National Film Board of Canada cartoon "The Big Snit", a husband and wife are playing Scrabble. He is staring at his letters, unable to spell anything with them. A reverse shot reveals that his tiles are "EEEEEEE".
- Daria: Daria adds "incarce" to "rate" in the episode "Big House".
- Goof Troop has a game where Goofy takes nearly a half an hour to take his turn, decides not to play "cat" because he doesn't have enough k's, chooses to spell the word "sesquipedalian", and gets falsely accused of Scrabble Babble by Pete for it.
- Metalocalypse: In the episode "Klokblocked", Skwissgaar spells "quhzk". To quote Toki:Yeah, "Quhzk"s. That's whats a duck says.
- Referred to in the cartoon "Napoleon Bunny-part": Bugs Bunny is playing with Napoleon's battle plans, maps and arsenal models, and tells him "This has Scrabble beat a mile! You oughta patent it!"
- The Simpsons: In "Bart the Genius", Bart spells out "KWYJIBO" in a game of Scrabble he plays with his family.
- VeggieTales: In "Where's God When I'm S-Scared?", during "Oh No", the Wisemen give us this line as to what they plan to do to Daniel:"We could use him as a footstool or a table to play Scrabble on,
Then tie him up and beat him up and throw him out of Babylon!"
Other Media
- There's a scary Short Story about a man who plays Scrabble with his wife. Any time either of them spells out a word, that word takes place on the other person. (For example, FLY causes a fly to appear or something.) It ends when the wife plays DEATH... The story is called "Death by Scrabble".
