读者文摘:拼字大赛冠军谢尔曼访谈（在线收听）

Do you have a favorite letter? The C. A lot of starting-out players are afraid of C's because they don't make any two-letter words.

你有最喜欢的字母吗？C。很多新手都害怕C这样的字母。因为他们构不成任何两个字母的单词。

But I did a survey of the dictionary and found that the C starts more words than any other letter in the alphabet except S.

但是我研究了一下字典，我发现除了字母S外，以C开头的单词比其它任何字母都要多。

It also combines well with H, L, R, and S and ends a lot of adjectival words.

C和H、L、S组成的单词很多，而且C是很多形容词的结尾。

So it's massively powerful. Wait, you did a "survey" of the dictionary? How many words do you know?

所以它非常强大。等一下，你“研究”了一下字典？你知道多少单词？

Probably around 120,000. Were you always good at Scrabble? Well, I was beating my mother regularly when I was eight.

大概12万个。你一直都擅长拼字游戏吗？我八岁的时候经常赢我的母亲。

Your older brother, Larry Sherman, also plays. Are you the Serena and Venus Williams of the Scrabble world?

你的哥哥拉里·谢尔曼也玩这个游戏。你们是拼字游戏世界的大小威廉姆斯吗？

He's not as close to me as Venus is to Serena. We're more like the McEnroe brothers. We're usually in the same division, but he's on the lower end.

他和我的水平差距要比塞雷娜与维纳斯的差距要大。我们更像是麦肯罗兄弟。我们经常在一个级别中，但是他水平要低一些。

When did you realize you were going to win the championship? Not until the very last draw.

你什么时候意识到你要夺得冠军了？知道最好一次抽签。

I had four tiles left, and I took the last three tiles out of the bag: two blanks and an S.

我还剩下4块，我从袋子里拿出了最后3块：两个空格和一个S。

It allowed me to bingo out—play all seven tiles and earn a 50-point bonus. What was your winning word? Strings!

它让我取得了成功，七张牌全部打完，赢了50分奖金。你获胜的单词是什么？弦乐器！