Obvs, it’s OK to rack up a triple word score with
As Scrabble board game bids to attract younger players...
OK Scrabble fans, it is time to get down with the kids – because 300 new words are coming your way. In a bid to attract more youngsters to the popular board game The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary has been updated to include words such as “ew”, “lolz”, “obvs” and “emoji”.
And it is now OK to lay down OK when you are having a night on the tiles. Yowza! (Yep, that too.)
“OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for for a long time,” said Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster, who devised the first Scrabble dictionary in 1976.
“But we’re also incorporating changes in language brought about by texting and social media, even transcribed speech – sounds like ew, mm-hmm, coulda and kinda.”
As fans scrabble to snap up the dictionary’s sixth edition we take a close look at a game that never leaves you bored...
New York City architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game in 1933, calling it Lexico, then Criss Cross Words. His friend and business partner James Brunot later renamed it Scrabble.
To calculate how many tiles there should be, and how many points each letter should have, Butts counted letter frequency on the front page of The New York Times.
Scrabble is available in more than 50 languages including Welsh (released in 2005) and Irish (2009). There is also a Braille version and an unofficial set using Star Trek language Klingon.
There are 19 letter A tiles in Malaysian Scrabble, the most for any letter in any language.
There is a daily newspaper column in Thailand devoted solely to Scrabble.
Some fanatics play a version of the game called Clabbers in which words and letters can be played in any order as long as they form an anagram of an actual word.
It is not possible to play in Japanese or Chinese, but they play in English with a rule book in their own languages.
If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were placed end to end they would go round the earth eight times.
On average, more than eight games of Scrabble are started every second.
Celebrity Scrabble fans include the Queen, Sting, Joan Collins, Kylie Minogue, Mel Gibson and Janet Street-Porter – who says it is more addictive than sex or drugs.
English Scrabble has 100 tiles. The most tiles are in Italian and Portuguese which both have 120.
In an episode of The Simpsons, Bart cheats at Scrabble by playing the bogus word KWYJIBO for a huge score defining it as a “balding North American ape with a small chin”.
A Scrabble Championship is one of the only places games players are not penalised for swearing and inappropriate language – as swear words that feature in the official Scrabble dictionary can be played.
Underwater Scrabble was played at Portsmouth University in 1995 in aid of Children In Need, using laminated boards and tiles with lead weights.
The only letter that cannot form part of a two-letter word in Scrabble is V.
Play at the first Scrabble World Championships in London in 1991 was held up when organisers forgot to bring the letter tiles.
The highest possible score on one turn is 1,782, achieved by adding tiles to form the word OXYPHENBUTAZONE across three triple-word scores.
The only number equal to the sum of the Scrabble tiles needed to spell it is TWELVE.
Somewhere in the world there are more than one million missing Scrabble tiles.
UK players have their own organisation, the Association of British Scrabble Players. It was taken to court in 1995 by an irate player for allowing too little time for him to go to the toilet between games.
In 1996 a woman was charged with assault in Haggerstown, US, when she struck her husband over the head with a Scrabble board.
Scrabble is used in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to decide the answer to the ultimate question – What is the Meaning Of Life?
In 1985 Lt Commander Waghorn and L Corp Gill played Scrabble continuously for five days when trapped in a crevasse in Antarctica.
There is a town called Scrabble in Berkeley County, West Virginia, US. It has no Scrabble club.
When players use all seven of their tiles to make a word, it’s called a bingo.
The longest word allowed with only vowels is EUOUAE (a Gregorian cadence). The longest word with only consonants is CRWTHS – the plural of a Welsh stringed instrument.
Scrabble features in bestselling books The Handmaid’s Tale, Lolita and Rosemary’s Baby.
Scrabble tiles have featured on the covers of bestselling albums by Crowded House and World Party.
To celebrate the 60th birthday of Prince Charles and Scrabble, both in 2008, a portrait of the prince made of Scrabble tiles was created.