Game’s dictionary adds hundreds of words
First update since 2018
NEW YORK » Here’s the sitch, Scrabble stans. Your convos around the board are about to get more interesting with about 500 new words and variations added to the game’s official dictionary: stan, sitch, convo, zedonk, dox and fauxhawk among them.
Out this month, the addons in the seventh edition of “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” join more than 100,000 words of two to eight letters. The book was last updated in 2018 through a longstanding partnership between Hasbro
and Merriam-Webster.
The new words include some trademarks gone generic — dumpster for one — some shorthand joy like guac, and a delicious display of more verb variations: torrented, torrenting, adulted, adulting, atted, atting (as in don’t at me, bro).
“We also turned verb into a verb so you can play verbed and verbing,” said Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, a smile on his face and a word-nerd glitter in his eye during an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.
Fauxhawk, a haircut similar to a Mohawk, is potentially the highest scoring newbie, he said. Embiggen, a verb meaning to increase in size, is among the unexpected. (Sample sentence: “I really need to embiggen that Scrabble dictionary.”)
Compound words are on the rise in the book with deadname, pageview, fintech, allyship, babymoon and subtweet. So are the “uns,” such as unfollow, unsub and unmute. They may sound familiar, but they were never Scrabble official, at least when it comes to the sainted game’s branded dictionary.
Tournament play is a whole other matter, with a broader range of agreedupon words.
Sokolowski and a team of editors at Merriam-Webster have mined the oftfreshened online database at Merriam-Webster.com to expand the Scrabble book. While the official rules of game play have always allowed the use of any dictionary that players sanction, many look to the official version when sitting down for a spot of Scrabble. Some deluxe Scrabble sets include one of the books.
In the last year or two, the Scrabble lexicon has been scrubbed of 200-plus racial, ethnic and otherwise offensive words — despite their presence in some dictionaries. That has prompted furious debate among tournament players. Supporters of the cleanup called it long overdue. Others argued that the words, however heinous in definition, should remain playable so long as points are to be had.
Despite home play rules that never specifically banned offensive words, you won’t find the notorious 200 in the Scrabble dictionary, with rare exceptions for those with other meanings.
The new Scrabble book includes at least one oldfashioned word that simply fell under the radar for years: yeehaw.
“Yeehaw is like so many of the older, informal terms. They were more spoken than written, and the gold standard for dictionary editing was always written evidence. So a term like yeehaw, which we all know from our childhood and in
movies and TV, was something you heard. You didn’t read it that often,” Sokolowski said.
Among other new eightletter words, the kind that help players clear their seven-tile racks for 50 extra points: hogsbane, more commonly known as giant hogweed. Another: pranayam, a breath technique in yoga.
Sokolowski wouldn’t reveal all 500 of the new words, challenging players to hunt them down on their own. Are your Scrabble
senses scrambled, so to speak?
“All of these are words that have already been vetted and defined and added to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, and now we’ve determined they’re playable in Scrabble,” Sokolowski said. “You’ve got some fun new words.”
So which new entry is the word master’s favorite? It’s the one that sounds like the way acorn is pronounced.
“I like eggcorn,” Sokolowski said, “because it’s a word about words.”