When his opponent slammed down a word without even one consonant in it, Norm Byng had to pause the game.
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"The woman put down the letters E, U, O, U, A, E, and S. I thought, 'I have to challenge that', I've never seen that," Mr Byng recalls.
"I put it into the computer, and the computer can only tell you if it's acceptable or not. It was. So I checked it, I went to the dictionary and it said the meaning was 'a trope'. Well, what does that mean?
"I later found out it was a musical term."
In all his years of playing, that is the strangest word Mr Byng has ever seen on the Scrabble board, and unfortunately, he has not had occasion to use it himself.
But, at times, he has been able to raise eyebrows around the Scrabble board by spelling out the equally little-known 'euoi'.
"E, U, O, and I is another acceptable word. It means 'a cry of Bacchic revels'," Mr Byng said.
"I don't know how to say it, but I can spell it, and it's a very handy word when you get drowned with vowels.
"That's one of the most consistent frustrations of the game when you end up with a hand full of either vowels or consonants. You've got to know what you can do with it."
For the past 12 years, Mr Byng has been involved in the Wagga Scrabble Club and since COVID-19 hit last year, he has been running the weekly meetings from his living room. Before that, the members met weekly in Gumly Gardens.
"What's fascinating about Scrabble? I think if you like words, you like Scrabble," Mr Byng said.
"Language is always changing. Computer language is becoming more a part of it, you can use words like 'email' now, you couldn't do that years ago."
His eloquent use of words brings particular satisfaction to Mr Byne, who left school when he was just 14 years old.
"I lived in Perth, I was going to an all-boys school and I didn't like the culture of bullying in that environment, so I came home one day and I said to my dad, 'that's it, I'm not going back', and I didn't," Mr Byng said.
"I went off to be a messenger boy for 12 months and I joined the air force at 15."
It was the uniform that brought him to Wagga and introduced him to his wife of 60 years, Joy.
"I stayed in the air force for 15 years, my last posting was in Wagga," he said.
"I met Joy when I was an apprentice in the air force when I went to St Andrew's Hall for a dance. There was a spark."
A case of mistaken identity almost stole the young couple's future happiness though.
"I couldn't get to the dance again the next week and Joy met another fella in uniform that night," Mr Byng said.
"Luckily there was no spark with him."
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As Mrs Byng recalls it, she had approached the other man in uniform thinking it was the same gentleman she had danced with weeks prior.
"They all looked the same in the uniform," Mrs Byng said.
"It was a different time, we didn't have each other's numbers, we had to wait to see each other again."
A couple of weeks later, while on his way to another Saturday night dance, Mr Byng spotted a familiar face on the street.
"I caught up to her, saw it was the same woman, and this time we exchanged numbers," he said.
A couple of years later, when aged only 18 and 20, the couple married and set out on their word-loving, game-playing journey through life together.
"Norm's always been the games guy," Mrs Byng said.
"He taught me all of that, but then you learn enough that it's no longer just his thing. You do it for yourself as much as you do it for each other.
"I think that's the secret to a good life, you have to enjoy it together. We've been on a lot of adventures, we've always done it together and we've always enjoyed it."
While the words excite Mr Byng the most, it's the gameplay that appeals to his wife of 60 years.
"Joy's learnt to play a very strategic game," Mr Byng said.
"If you want to win a game, you have to give your opponent less chance of getting high scoring words.
"The openings you leave your opposition are more important than the words you make on the board.
"That's what beginners forget, they think it's about getting words down, but that's not all there is to it."
Freely admitting that he orbits a more competitive world, Mr Byng said he is fortunate to have a wife who recognises the fun in everything.
Consequently, in all their years of playing together, neither can recall a time when the couple's Scrabble playing resulted in a marital row.
"No matter what you play you can make it competitive," Mr Byng said.
"We just had our 60th anniversary on New Year's Eve, so we must be doing something right."
With two children, four grandchildren, four great-grandchildren "and another on the way", now, the couple is able to share their love of wordplay with the next generation.
Though the games of choice and their mode of playing have changed.
"I play Words With Friends with my eldest granddaughter, it's slightly different," Mr Byng said.
"It's a slightly different board and a different dictionary to remember when you're playing."
Such is Mr Byng's devotion with the game that he would be classed among a distinct minority of people who could read the dictionary for fun.
"It really is a crazy dictionary, some of the words in it you look at and think, 'how have they justified that?'
"There's a lot of rude words in it, I won't say the rudest ones, but if you've heard the word 'fugly', well that's in there," he said.
"That's just one example, but how do you justify that as a word?"
Members of the club have on occasion stumbled across the stranger words inside the dictionary mid-play, prompting a brief intermission for their collective bemusement and discussion.
"Some of the girls will go through the book and they'll find something that surprises them," Mrs Byng said.
"They'll say 'did you know that's in there, have you heard of that word?'"
The depth of his knowledge for obscure words has led him astray on the board though.
While competing in a tri-state tournament many years ago, Mr Byng spelled out a word that would have won the game.
If only it was recognised by the all-in-important game-play dictionary.
"I could either write the word 'scoring' or 'coring', and I realised that 'coring' would actually get me more points on the board," he said.
'Coring', as he knew, refers to the method of aerating a golfing green.
"As a golfer, I thought it was perfectly acceptable. But it wasn't in the dictionary, so I lost my turn and then I lost the game," he said.
"I was disappointed in that, but it is a strange dictionary."