Now Scrabble goes woke with list of banned words

A LIST of racially offensive and derogatory slurs have been banned from use in Scrabble, much to the annoyance of competitive players.

The list of all 400 now-banned words has not been published by Mattel, but according to the official online Scrabble word-checker, a number of offensive terms for black, Pakistani and Irish people have been removed.

The banned list includes words considered to be racial or ethnic slurs, including the n word, ‘Shiksha (a derogatory Jewish term), ‘Paki’, and ‘Fenian’.

This move has been condemned by some members of the World

English-Language Scrabble Players Association. Three prominent members of WESPA have quit the association in protest.

Darryl Francis, who has written books on the game, is one such member. He told the Times that ‘words listed in dictionaries and Scrabble lists are not slurs’. ‘They only become slurs when used with a derogatory purpose or intent, or used with a particular tone and in a particular context,’ he argued.

‘Words in our familiar Scrabble word lists should not be removed because of a PR purpose disguised as promoting some kind of social betterment.’