Pop culture spurs update of dictionary for ‘Friends’

NEW YORK — Tell your bae or your bestie: The mobile game Words With Friends has added thousands of pop-culture words as part of its largest dictionary update in the game’s eightyear history.

Included among the 50,000 added by game developer Zynga (in addition to and

are

and Gurpreet Singh, director of product for the Scrabbleesque game, said Friends players are constantly suggesting — on social media and in the game itself, which has a submission feature — words they would like added to the dictionary.

Zynga receives 5,000 such suggestions a day, he said — and they 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 worldwide at any given time.

Before the addition, the existing Friends dictionary — which is always evolving — contained 173,000 words. The game earlier this year added after President Donald Trump introduced the mysterious term and it spread like wildfire on social media; and were added in 2014.

Singh said there’s no hardand-fast rule for what kind of words are added but that 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.”