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In Scrabble, what is the highest possible score achievable after the very first move? And where does the word ZANJERO fall on the list of high-scoring words?

(Another question on this site, namely What is the highest game score theoretically possible in Scrabble using 1 player and the International Scrabble Dictionary?, asks about the highest possible score at the end of a single-player game, while this question is about the highest possible score after just the first move (whether one player or two or more).)

Context: In Woody Allen's (fictional) The Gossage–Vardebedian Papers, first published in The New Yorker in January 1966 and later collected in his book Getting Even (1971) (in turn later collected into the book The Insanity Defense (2007)), the last of a sequence of letters ends with the absurd idea of playing Scrabble over correspondence:

[…] I accept your invitation to Scrabble in good spirits. Get out your set. […] I shall make the first play. The seven letters I have just turned up are O, A, E, J, N, R, and Z—an unpromising jumble that should guarantee, even to the most suspicious, the integrity of my draw. Fortunately, however, an extensive vocabulary coupled with a penchant for esoterica, has enabled me to bring etymological order out of what, to one less literate, might seem a mishmash. My first word is "ZANJERO." Look it up. Now lay it out, horizontally, the E resting on the center square. Count carefully, not overlooking the double word score for an opening move and the fifty-point bonus for my use of all seven letters. The score is now 116—0.

Your move.
Gossage

So Allen has come up with an initial word that scores highly. (I don't know whether the 116 is correct—it seems high considering this question about typical Scrabble scores—but it does seem like it would be a high-scoring initial word.)

Of course he picked this word for comedic effect, but it got me to wonder: what would be the highest possible score in Scrabble after the first move? (And what word(s) would achieve it?) And of the best initial words, where is ZANJERO on that list?

(I imagine it should be possible to exhaustively enumerate this by trying all words of up to 7 letters from a dictionary and all allowed ways of placing them on an empty board, and maybe someone has already done it, but I couldn't find it.)

ShreevatsaR
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1 Answers1

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As this question has already received multiple downvotes, it appears that questions like this are not a good fit for the community here, so I set out to find the answer myself. Using this program, and the word lists from the NASPA Zyzzyva app (per this answer), I was able to get the following answers:

  • The top word, using any of the available word lists, is the same: MUZJIKS achieves a score of 128, when placed such that S lies on the center square. This matches the answer that is found in Total Scrabble: The (Un)Official SCRABBLE® Record Book by Keith W. Smith, on page 68 under "Hypothetical records":

    Highest Opening Play
    128 points, MUZJIKS

    If we allow words from other dictionaries, ZYXOMMA, found in Funk & Wagnall's New Standard Dictionary scores 130 points.

  • The word ZANJERO (though associated with Los Angeles) is actually not found in the North American dictionaries (NWL2023 and NWL2023), but only in the British one (CSW24). It indeed achieves a score of 116 when placed such that E lies on the center square (so that Z gets the double letter score).

  • Between them, there are many words (which I've also added to the same gist) that achieve good scores, for example:

    128 MUZJIKS [] 7          (the 7 means that the seventh letter S is on the center square)
126 QUARTZY [] [2, 5]     (only in the CSW list)
120 SQUEEZE [] [2, 6]
120 QUIZZED [Z] [1, 5]    (the `[Z]` means we use a blank tile)
120 JUKEBOX [] [3, 5]
120 JEZEBEL [] 7
118 SHOWBIZ [] 3
116 WHEEZED [] 1
ShreevatsaR
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