Bingo is a term used in North American Scrabble for a play in which a player puts seven tiles on the board in a single turn. Mattel, the game's manufacturer outside North America, uses the term bonus to describe such a word. In French, it is called a scrabble. A player who does this receives a 50-point bonus, which is applied after the rest of the play is scored.
Bingos are an important part of achieving high scores in Scrabble. While many beginners rarely play even one during a game, experts frequently score three or more. Much advanced strategy revolves around maximizing one's chance of playing of a bingo: blank tiles are kept, poor letter combinations such as BVW, LLNNN, or IIIUU are broken up, and flexible letter combinations such as AEINST (a six-letter "stem" that anagrams with 24 letters—all but Q and Y—to form nearly 70 bingos) are aimed for until a bingo is formed. This strategy is often at direct odds with that of placing high-value letters on premium squares.
The highest-scoring bingo ever played in an official Scrabble tournament was by Karl Khoshnaw, who got 392 points for CAZIQUES in a 1982 game in Manchester.[1]