Becoming and expert Scrabble player necessarily involves memorizing words. But just opening up the dictionary at "A" and going straight through is ridiculously inefficient because of the probability of ever being able to play most longer words in a game. Realizing that they were limited by the tile distribution, experts of yore analyzed the dictionary and came up with lists of words that were more likely to show up on your rack- words that contained mostly single-point tiles, as these are the most plentiful. Few of these competitive Scrabble pioneers did as much dictionary-scouring and list-compiling as Mike Baron. Inside this behemoth are list after list of the best words to know, with Baron's commentary on how the lists came about and some suggestions on which lists to start with.