Imagine walking into a high-stakes Scrabble tournament in a language you don’t even speak—and walking out with the trophy.
Sounds like a made-up movie plot, right? But this is real life, and it’s starring a man named Nigel Richards.
In 2024, Nigel won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain. The wild part? He doesn’t speak Spanish.
Not even a little.
Not even the basics.
And yet, there he was, sitting across from fluent speakers, casually laying down seven-letter word bombs like it was just another Tuesday.
? A Memory Like No Other
This isn’t Nigel’s first rodeo. Back in 2015, he pulled the same stunt in French—memorizing the entire French Scrabble dictionary in just nine weeks and then winning the French-language championship.
Without understanding French.
This time around, he gave himself a bit more breathing room: one year to absorb the entire Spanish Scrabble dictionary.
Let that sink in. No Duolingo. No grammar books. Just brute-force word memorization. Thousands of words, no context, no conversations. He didn’t learn how to say “hello,” but he could probably crush you with an obscure 30-point noun you’ve never even heard of.
? The Tiger Woods of Scrabble
Nigel’s method is mind-boggling. He doesn’t learn the meaning of the words—just how they look, how they score, and how they fit on the board.
His brain works like a high-performance pattern-recognition machine with a killer vocabulary recall function. No wonder he’s often called the “Tiger Woods of Scrabble.”
But let’s be real—Tiger Woods at least knows what a golf club does. Nigel just needs to know how the letters line up and which combo hits the triple-word score. Who needs conversation when you’ve got a 500-point game in your pocket?
? What Can Language Learners Take From This?
Okay, you’re probably thinking: should I drop my language classes and just start cramming the dictionary? Let’s slow down.
What Nigel achieved is incredible, but it’s also super niche. It’s a bit like training for the Olympics by only doing one arm curl over and over—and then somehow winning gold. It shows how powerful memory, discipline, and laser-sharp focus can be. But it’s not the whole story of language learning.
True fluency means more than just knowing words.
It’s about understanding context, mastering grammar, recognizing cultural references, and being able to communicate and connect with people. Memorizing words can help—it builds a foundation. But it’s only one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
? Still, It’s Pretty Awesome
Nigel Richards might not be giving TED Talks in Spanish anytime soon, but his story reminds us that the brain is capable of incredible things.
It also shows that language, for all its complexities, can sometimes be approached from a completely unexpected angle.
So while we’re out here struggling to remember the word for “pineapple” in our target language, just remember: somewhere out there, a man is memorizing thousands of foreign words—and absolutely crushing it at Scrabble without speaking a word of the language.
Now that’s legendary.
Hey fellow Linguaholics! It’s me, Marcel. I am the proud owner of linguaholic.com. Languages have always been my passion and I have studied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Sinology at the University of Zurich. It is my utmost pleasure to share with all of you guys what I know about languages and linguistics in general.