A recent
article by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy" has re-surfaced one of my old
posts regarding scrabble. In it I said that after the first turn, you must get an 8-letter word to use all your letters, because your seven letters need to connect to an existing word.
This, of course, is not correct, as was pointed out in comments to the Numbers Guy's blog (this was also pointed out by my sister). All you need to do to use all your letters with a 7-letter word is find a place to connect that is parallel to an existing word. For example, 'weather' could be connected parallel to a word ending in 'E", since 'we' is a word.
Maybe that's why my sister won so many scrabble games against me when I was a kid.