I have a few Polish friends whose names stand out as exceptional point scores for Scrabble. At least, that is, if you can find a way to throw in a few extra zzz’s into your word. My own name (N Minter Dial) is rather uninteresting from a Scrabble perspective in that it is, for the most part, full of letters with a score of 1!  I have one 3 (M) and one 2 (D).  It is a run of the mill. Nonetheless, I struggled to come up with a long word from those 11 characters. Thanks to the handy online scrabblefinder app, I was able to discover that I have four 9-letter words that can be made out of my name.

Meaning behind a name?

Most of the words are beyond my vocabulary knowledge (ouch and a reminder that there are many unknown words among the 500,000 in the English language).

There was, however, one word that caught my attention: mainliner.

Some of you might know that my mother’s family comes from St David’s, Pennsylvania, aka the Mainline. I thought that it was rather revealing.  As Proust wrote in Du Cote de Chez Swann, the signs are the signs.  (“Les signes sont dans les cignes” is the exact quote, but I spell out the double entendre).  I also enjoyed the airline word (a good deal more than ailment!)

The question I have for you is: what does your name say about you?