02 June 2015

Thousands of new Scrabble words

A nightmare for prescriptivists:
Thousands of new words - including slang terms lolz, shizzle and obvs - have been added to the latest Scrabble word list, its publisher has said.

About 6,500 words have been added to the latest Collins Scrabble Word List, including a number of slang terms used on social media and in text messages. New words include twerking, emoji, bezzy and ridic - short for ridiculous.

Other new words now acceptable in the board game include onesie, devo - short for devolution - vape, and shootie, meaning a fashionable shoe that covers the ankle. New words involving technology include facetime, hashtag, and sexting, while exclamations such as augh, blech, eew, grr, waah and yeesh have also been added.

It is the first update to the list since 2011.
A clever ploy by the publishers to make me replace my Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.  Again.

4 comments:

  1. Nah, you're good. The Collins list is the CSW lexicon, not the North American OSPD/OTCWL lexicon. On the other hand, the OTCWL list also updated last year, and became the tournament lexicon a couple of months back, so...

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  2. Entering slang terms is crap. If I ran a Scrabble tournament, I'd go back to a year when the official lexicon contained entries that actually had history and staying power behind them.

    lolz and obvs ?

    Seriously?

    Not in my game.

    Lurker111

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Actually, that should have been,

      Srsly?

      Lurker111

      Delete
  3. I accept only what's in a real dictionary, several years old.
    It used to be in the rules that slang was not permitted... i.e., even if it was in the dictionary, but had sl. in the definition, then it was not allowed.
    Many of these terms will be gone in a few years. And scrabble will be scrbl....
    It is sad that they are pandering to the illiterate.

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