I have jumped on the time-wasting bandwagon that is Words With Friends. In case your life hasn’t been slowly sucked away by this addictive iPhone app, I will explain what it is (also, because the Words With Friends web site is currently unavailable – what?).

It is just like Scrabble, only you can play multiple games with multiple people who are nowhere near you and you might not even know them. The screen is like a Scrabble board and you draw letters each time and spell words, getting points in Double and Triple Word squares and Double and Triple Letter squares – just like Scrabble. The cool thing is that once you play your turn, a notification is sent to the iPhone/iPod Touch of the other player saying you’ve played and they play their turn the next chance they get. Since I have an infant, I often go several hours between playing turns, which I hope is fine because the other person can’t play their turn until you’ve played yours anyway.

I am currently playing 5 games, some with people I don’t know too well IRL (in real life), but I enjoy playing the game even though I am not good at it at all, really.

Christian has the app too and, sadly, we have sat right next to each other on the couch playing Words With Friends with each other on our iPhones. Even though we own a Scrabble board.

But we do differ on one point. When I get weird letters like Q or V or Y, I start making up words and putting the letters in odd combinations until I find a word that the app says is actually a word. This is how I discovered the words “qua” and “xi”. I have no idea what they mean, but they are words!

However, Christian says this is cheating. He says you need to know the words, and what they mean if you are going to play them. I say, this is how you learn new words! You just make them up until you find one! What do you think?