Scrabble adds 500 new playable words, like ‘vax,’ ‘deepfake’ and ‘Jedi’
By Scottie Andrew, CNN
As our language evolves, so does Scrabble: Now, you can use hundreds of new words, from “ambigram” to “zedonk,” to spell your way to victory in the beloved board game.
Hasbro and Merriam-Webster have added more than 500 new words to the official Scrabble dictionary, which consists of all of the game’s playable words. It now includes words that weren’t commonly used when the game was first created in the 1930s, like “adorbs,” “dox” or “zoodle.”
The newest edition of “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary,” its seventh, bends some of the game’s rigid rules: Typically, in Scrabble, slang is allowed, but abbreviations and words that are always capitalized are not.
The latest crop of Scrabble-approved words, though, have been expanded to include proper nouns like Google and Boricua (both words’ length and amount of vowels make them potentially high scorers). Players can even use “Jedi” (but not “Yoda”) to score some points.
Some of the new words simply didn’t exist up until a few years ago, “deepfake” and “subtweet” among them. Newer slang has made its way into Scrabble, too, including “vax” and “guac.”
In a statement, Merriam-Webster editor at large Peter Sokolowski said the new additions to the dictionary give players an opportunity to “up their game while celebrating the riches of the ever-expanding language.”
“English speakers like to have fun with words, and no one does it better than Scrabble players, who make excellent use of words both obscure and common,” Sokolowski said.
The complete list of Scrabble-friendly words can be accessed in the new edition of the Scrabble dictionary or online, on Merriam-Webster’s Scrabble Word Finder.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
