Offensive words face purge from Scrabble in US

SCRABBLE looks set to ban the use of hundreds of slurs and other offensive words in professional tournaments in the United States, amid a reckoning on racism.

The North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) is preparing to vote this week to remove some 226 “offensive” words from its official lexicon for judging and believes the move has enough support to pass.

The game, sold by Hasbro which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, has not included the slurs in its dictionary since 1994, however, the players’ association continued to allow them as they are “part of the English language”.

The offensive words have been separated into seven categories: slur, anatomical, political, profane, prurient, scatological, and vulgar.

The N-word and other racial epithets are included on the list likely to be banned. “Fatsoes”, “lesbos”, “jailbait” and ageist terms such as “greybeard” and “wrinklies” also feature, as does “haole”, a word used by Hawaiians for people not from the US state, and “culchie”, a pejorative term for someone from rural Ireland. Several transphobic words are also slated for removal.

The decision will probably impact online versions of the game too. Officials who govern Scrabble tournaments in Britain are discussing whether to follow suit.

The debate comes amid anti-racism protests by the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis in May.

Twitter recently announced it was dropping the words “master”, “slave” and “blacklist”, widely used in computer programming, in favour of more inclusive terms.

John Chew, the chief executive of the NASPA, admitted members of the professional Scrabble community are split over the purge.

But he added: “This is just a game we are playing and we have to do what we can to make things right, just in our little corner of the world.”