IT is a game where vocabulary is king and the winner is usually someone who can tell a quonk from a tomial.

Wordsmiths from across the UK are squaring off over the tiles this weekend as the National Scrabble Championships gets underway in Milton Keynes.

The world building game, which is loved by millions around the globe, has a fiercely competitive scene and top players vie each year to be crowned National Champion.

Among those in the running to take the title this year are two Scots keen to test their knowledge of the more obscure corners of the English language against similarly wordy foes.

(Incidentally, a quonk is a noise picked up by a microphone, while a tominal is the cutting part of a bird's beak).

Stuart Harkness, a 29-year-old father of one from Tweedbank in the Borders, first got into Scrabble while studying at St Andrews University.

Despite being a maths teachers in his day job, he hopes to prove his expertise lies with words and letters, and says he loves the feeling of stealing a game with an obscure word.

He said: "Frankly, I love competition. I love learning new things, memorising facts, and pushing myself in everything I do. My first tournament was almost ten years ago, and I still get the same buzz when I draw my tiles today.

"The Scottish Scrabble community is very close-knit and friendly, but there is no love lost when the timer starts. UK-wide tournaments like this one are something special.

"There are over fifty players taking part from all over the country, in one single division, some of whom you may have never played before. There are also two ex-World Champions in the field, and the opportunity to claim a big scalp is exciting."

Training for the tournament sees top players playing up to ten games a night online, but Harkness says that he's not had enough time this year to put in as many hours at the board as he would have liked.

However, he is hoping to give a good account of himself, even if the crown eludes him.

He said: "I haven't put in as much practice as I would have liked recently - I frequently used to play up to ten online games most evenings - but it's not easy to keep this up with a teaching job and a child.

"Realistically I'd be happy to win half of my games, such is the standard of the players at the event, with a couple of sweet moves thrown in to boot."

Chris Cummins, 33, from Edinburgh, will also be hoping to post a respectable word score. The linguistics teacher, who works at the University of Edinburgh, has been playing Scrabble competitively for 15 years.

He said: "I've always enjoyed word games and puzzles. There are a few things I particularly enjoy about the game: it has simple rules but it's creative and each game is different.

"There's enough of an element of luck to make it unpredictable, but not so much that it takes the skill out.

"And although you're playing against an opponent, really you're each playing against the board with the letters you happen to draw, so it doesn't matter all that much if the players aren't evenly matched."

He added: "The boards in a tournament like this look very strange to the casual observer, as they're covered in words that are commonplace to experienced Scrabblers because they come up a lot in the game, but are pretty much unheard of in real life: "etaerio", "otarine", "etourdi", etc.

"The top players also prepare a lot: I meant to, but didn't really get round to it. I'm in the mid-range of rankings as far as the NSC is concerned, so I'll be hoping for a respectable mid-table finish.

"That said, playing strong players is a particular challenge, because it's easy to get disconcerted when they play words that you've never seen before."

The last Scot to win the championship was Paul Allan, 43, from Aberdeen, in 2013. He sealed his win by playing bandura, a type of Ukrainian lute, which scored him 86 points and gave him an unassailable lead in the deciding match.