Word repetition

by Janjan
(Philippines)

I've been playing scrabble since childhood and it was in college when I began joining scrabble tournaments. I'm just confused about the rule on word repetition. When I was in college, the scrabble committee allows word repetition at any part of the game. Meaning, you can re-use a word on the board for how many times as much as you like. But when I played on another tournament (at my company's sports league), my opponent said, and insisted, that word repetition is only allowable at the near end of the game where there only few tiles left. Is this true? Is there an official rule to this? And how would someone determine that these number of tiles or this part of the game is the commencement of the word repetition?

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Hi there Janjan - I can assure you there is absolutely no rule against word repetition at any stage of the game.

The official Scrabble rules don't mention it, and official Scrabble tournaments allow repeated words any time.

I'm not sure where the myth about repetition comes from, but it is definitely false. Obviously 'house' rules can outlaw repeated words if they want to, and I'm sure many households do, but in official circles you can play the same word in every single move of the game if you want to ;-)

Hope that helps,