This is 3amjosh’s submission for the HP Magic Giveaway. Feel free to leave comments for this article as you see fit – your feedback is certainly welcomed! If you’d like to submit your own how-to, what-is, or top-five list, you can send it to me. Views and opinions of this writer are not necessarily my own:
on geeks.pirillo and this is my entry for the HP Touchsmart Competition. It’s a How To on the “CheckWord” app for iPhone/iPod touch.

Do you play Scrabble with friends? Do you often find yourself arguing the validity of a word they are claiming is legit? Do you usually forget your handy dandy Webster’s Dictionary? If you’re like me, you have lost your pride many times when a word you believe is legit gets busted when your friends consult a dictionary to prove you wrong. Which takes away precious time for you to create megawords and rack up some points on scrabble. Well, the app store has brought us many applications but one of my favorites and most used is CheckWord.

Checkword pulls from two different lists of words. TWL is the 2006 tournament word list used in North America and other countries: Thailand and Israel. The list contains 178,691 words from AA to ZZZ. SOWPODS is the 2006 international word list used in English speaking countries that don’t use TWL. It contains 267,751 words. So for must of you, you will be using the TWL unless you want to trick your friends and get away with words that don’t really count. It does not contain proper nouns so your friends can’t get away with using Jeff or Canada.

With the features to tell you if words are good or not at the flick of a few thumb taps on your iPhone or iPod touch, this app is worth its weight in Gold. There is more to it than just a simple word search to prove your friends wrong.

Do you get stumped often with the letters on your stand and just have nowhere to go? Are you the type of person who enjoys cheating? Are you alright with deceiving your friends saying your checking words to see if they work? CheckWord has another great feature for you!

MakeWords will make you a Scrabble genius! Just click the little tab at the top of CheckWord that says MakeWord, and you will see a nice screen that lets you enter in random letters that you have to generate words from that list. Not only does it rank the words from amount of letters that can be used, it will even find words in patterns that are already laid out on the Scrabble board! Let me give you an example.

Your letters are ASETUI. Here are the results of the 61 words found:

• 3 Words with 5 letters: ETUIS, SAUTE, SUITE
• 19 Words with 4 letters: AITS, ATES, EAST, EATS, etc.
• 26 Words with 3 letters: AIS, AIT, ATE, EAT, etc.
• 13 Words with 2 letters: AE, AI, AS, AT, etc.

It even covers wildcards. If you have a wildcard, just substitute one of your seven letters with “.” and it will factor that in for some killer 5, 6, 7 or 8 word combos!

So, if you are into Scrabble this is a must have app! Take it to the next Scrabble party and either be honest and challenge your friends to play against the iPhone, or secretly sit and throw out some words that your friends will question the validity of and you can quickly show them with CheckWord that it is Legit! Have fun!

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