‘Words With Friends’ adds 50,000 pop culture entries
Tell your bae or bestie: “Words With Friends” is adding thousands of pop culture words as part of its largest dictionary update in the game’s eight-year history.
Game developer Zynga said Tuesday that it is adding 50,000 Internet slang words, including BFF, fitspo, delish, FOMO, hangry, kween, smize, TFW, turnt, werk, yas — as well as bae and bestie.
Gurpreet Singh, director of product for the Scrabble-esque game, said “Words With Friends” players are constantly asking about new words they would like added to the dictionary. The requests are made on social media and in the game itself, which has a submission feature. He said Zynga gets 5,000 suggestions a day, which formed the basis of the update.
“For us, it’s a way to listen to our players and also have a bit of fun,” Singh said. “The words that they’re requesting are really a reflection of what they’re doing in their day-to-day life and how they communicate with their loved ones.”
The multiplayer phonefriendly crossword game has been installed more than 200 million times since 2009, according to Zynga. This year, an estimated 57 million active “Words With Friends” games are being played around the world at any given time, the San Francisco company said.
The 50,000 words will be added to the game’s dictionary of 173,000 words, which is always evolving. It added “covfefe” after President Trump used the mysterious term in a tweet in May and it spread like wildfire on social media. Twerk and selfie were added in 2014.
Singh said there’s no hard and fast rule for what constitutes a word and what doesn’t. The team leans toward ones that are inclusive and popular.
“We try to be very holistic in our thinking,” he said. “It’s a game based on connecting, and if we feel our values are being adhered to by the word that we’re adding, then even if it’s not a proper word — as a standard dictionary would consider it to be — we would still go ahead and add those.”
Does Singh have some favorites? Yes, the high-point offering queso — “Anytime I can use a q, I’m happy,” he said. He also likes turnt, which is a variation on “turn up” that means getting excited.