Words With Friends & Scrabble "Qi"

I realized the other day that a words always seems to keep popping up when it comes to Words With Friends. This Scrabble clone in case you have been living under a rock, is the latest craze in social gaming. Made by the same addictive geniuses that gave us FarmVille, Zynga has really out done themselves! Lets just hope that they don't ever have a mind to actually start selling something truly addictive like cigarettes, or we are doomed as a society.

Anyway, a word that always seems to get played is "Qi". I'm sure you have probably seen it played, or even used it yourself. Maybe you know what this word actually is, or maybe you just played around with a bunch of letters until you were finally able to make a move. Who knows.. I see it all the time and no one has ever been able to tell me exactly what in the world it actually is!

So I embarked on a quest to actually figure out what in the word this often double and triple word scoring  word is. It turns out, it's something you're probably already familiar with, but probably had no clue it was spelled this way. In many Asian cultures, qi is the energy surrounding people and is often times referred to as a life force.

Depending on how you pronounce it, and what resource you check out, it's pronounced "Che" as in that guy Che Guevara, or Chi as in Chia Pet. Either way, odds are you probably would not have guessed this as a spelling! Have you used this tactic on Words With Friends or Scrabble? What other words have you had used on you that you can cry foul with?