Will help you to win at Scrabble

THE words ‘transperson’, ‘genderqueer’ and ‘cisgender’ have been added to board game Scrabble.

The realm of gender identity has been included in a new catalogue of acceptable words that reflects ‘many areas of contemporary life’.

Other additions to the Official Scrabble Words list for 2019 include the pronoun ‘ze’ which is used to refer to someone who does not define themselves as either male or female.

The term ‘ transphobia’ – to describe someone who is prejudiced against transgender people – and ‘misgender’ – referring to someone as the wrong gender – have also been included.

Dictionary publisher Collins, which compiles the list, has also included ‘manspreading’ – when a man spreads his legs in public. The list of 2,862 words, the first update since 2015, also includes youth culture slang words such as ‘bae’, ‘blud’ and ‘overshare’.

Collins looks at terms from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the US and UK and includes new words based on trends and spikes in usage.

Reflecting this, the word ‘incel’ – involuntary celibate – has made the list, as has ‘antivaxxer’ and ‘ dox’ – to share someone’s personal information online.

Political analysis has introduced the term ‘post-truth’ and, perhaps influenced by hit BBC series Bodyguard, the Russian word ‘kompromat’ has made the list. It refers to potentially compromising documents and photographs. The offence of ‘upskirting’ is another addition to the Scrabble repertoire.

Political phrases such as ‘Antifa’ – to describe an antifascist movement – and ‘Remainer’ and ‘omnishambles’ – a mismanaged situation – have also been added.

Among the more high-scoring new words, ‘ genderqueer’ – a person with a non-traditional gender identity – is worth 22 points, as is ‘aquafaba’, a vegan replacement for egg whites. Other trendy food added include pork paste ‘nduja’, spicy sauce ‘sriracha’ and ‘matcha’ – Japanese green tea.

Helen Newstead from Collins, said: ‘We select new words by looking for language trends and spikes in usage in the Collins Corpus, a six-billion-word database of the English language, and gender identity is one of the areas that has seen an increase in the number of new words.’

The official Scrabble Words list for 2019 has added the new entries to the existing 276,000 accepted words.