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Twerk, emoji, facepalm. Ew.
Last year, it would have been against the rules for casual Scrabble gamers to use any of these words. Not anymore. Merriam-Webster announced Monday that it has added more than 300 words to the latest edition of its official Scrabble dictionary.
"It means that in some ways the whole game is open and done again," said Emily Brewster, associate editor and lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. "I think it's especially exciting for people who play regularly."
Scrabble, the word game played with letter tiles, will turn 70 this year and remains one of the most durable and popular board games; it can also be played online. Last updated four years ago, the Scrabble dictionary contains more than 100,000 words of two to eight letters. The new edition of the Scrabble Dictionary is available online and in print and paperback. Versions for iOS, Android and Kindle will be available this month.
New words are added to the Merriam-Webster Scrabble dictionary if they are in a standard dictionary, especially the Merriam-Webster college dictionary. New additions can not include abbreviations, capitalized words, or words containing dashes or single quotes.
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The word "ok", for example, is readable now because it has been put in lower case in the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary.
In the standard dictionary, "previously, we only entered" OK "or" OK, "said Brewster, noting that capitalization of" OK "prevented it from being used as a Scrabble word in the past.
Learning all the words of two and three eligible letters is one of the best known ways to improve your scrabble score, especially when the board starts to be full. Thus, the dictionary's only new three-letter word, "zen", and its new two-letter words, "ew" and "ok", could be some of the most exciting additions for fans of the game.
"Whenever a two-letter word is added to the game, it definitely changes the strategy and dynamics of the game," said Stefan Fatsis, a competitive Scrabble player and author of "Word Freak," a book about the competitive Scrabble. . "So," ok "is a huge addition because it will be the first two-letter job that ends in a k."
Scrabble veteran players also know the value of learning words beginning with q, but do not require u. The new dictionary introduces "qapik", which means "a monetary subunit of the manat" in Azerbaijan. (Fortunately for the competitors, the game requires no knowledge of the definitions, only spelling.) "Qapik", however, will probably not have much game because there is only one tile and only one k.
Q and k, as well as j, x, and z, are known as power tiles in Scrabble jargon because they carry more points, said Fatsis.
Other additions to the official dictionary include "bitcoin", "listicle", "hivemind" and "sheeple "(people who are easily influenced). (A longer set of examples can be found here.)
The Merriam-Webster Scrabble Dictionary is the go-to source for those who play at home or at school, but official Scrabble tournaments use a different list of offensive words and up to 15 letters, said John Chew, co -President of the Scrabble Players Association of North America, who contributed to the development of the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Dictionary. The association's official word list will not be updated with new additions from Merriam-Webster until early next year, he added.
Aside from "ok," the word "zen" was one of the most important changes in the dictionary this year, said Chew, adding that he had received more complaints about his exclusion than any other word.
Some people showed up at Scrabble Club events, but were challenged by the word "zen" and then left without ever coming back, Chew said. "Everyone has an emotional feeling of owning one's own idiolect," he said.
In the future, Mr. Chew said, he would like to see Merriam-Webster add the word "xed": this is the past of the verb "x", which means scratching.
"I think I will wear them out over the next decade," he said.
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