WE stopped counting Craig’s lead at about 150 points as my boss’s parting words swam around my mind: “you have to win,” he warned; “the honour of The Northern Echo is on your shoulders; ask yourself how many points you get for the word ‘sack.’”

My thoughts swiftly turned to getting a new job, this time something nothing to words as it was becoming increasingly clear I hardly knew any.

Certainly not compared to Craig, 33, of Guisborough but who grew up in Norton, Stockton, and won £3,000 for becoming only the second English player to win the title to go with his Countdown title he won seven years ago.

In our game Craig, who actually prefers maths to reading, played the following words: gi, a judo costume, oe, a word that comes from the Isle of Shetland relating to the weather and gio, a word, not the only one, that Craig can’t remember the meaning of (probably something to do with the graciousness of God according to Google).

“You get to know those words and I do try to learn what they mean, really just so not to look daft,” said Craig, who explained he first came across Scrabble aged four playing on a Sinclair Spectrum.

“Some top players are really in to words, but others don’t know the meaning of lots of them at all..”

Craig, who failed his English Language GCSE but took up playing the game in clubs as a maths student aged 22 and talks about how he loves the ‘language’ of numbers as much as words, explained that the top players will often learn words by rote. For example Craig has studied three-letter words beginning with ‘q’ and words ending in ‘ology’ (he once got to use one of his favourite words, batology, meaning a study of brambles.

Others study Maori words which are accepted in New Zealand English. “A good one to know is ‘whio,’ it means a type of duck,” he explained. “I like that it adds to your knowledge, for example you learn a lot of animal names, but you also find out about these obscure animals.”

At that point Craig, sitting in his living room laughs, hopefully not at my pitiful efforts to compete. “It has helped me to insult people in a really obscure way,” he explains, “for example I’ve used stercobilin, which means the brown pigment you find in faeces, but of course the guy had no idea what it meant.”

Mr Beevers said his highest ever score for a single word was for bumbazes, an ancient Scottish word for bamboozled, which earned him more than 200 points, more than my final score of 135, although, in my defence I did get the word ‘qi,’ meaning energy in which I clung to as a matter of pride . His highest ever game score is 727 although he kindly stops at 290 in our game.

At that I go into town and start looking for a dictionary to try and find the right words for my boss.