Scrabble gets hip to postmodern lingo

You know those times when you played Scrabble and wished to up your score by laying down words like ‘lolz’ or ‘thanx’ – for the greater points the ‘Z’ and ‘X’ provide? You weren’t allowed to due to pedantic rules, right? Well now you can throw away the old rulebook and wave goodbye to pedantic English since Scrabble has added a host of slang to its dictionary including the aforementioned ‘thanx’ and ‘lolz’, and other doozies like ‘bezzy’, ‘vape’ and ‘shizzle’ (that last one courtesy of Snoop Dogg).

The 67-year-old board game – now available in various digital forms – recently introduced some 6,500 new words from the internet and texting era, the majority of these invented and adopted more readily by Generation Y than baby boomers.

A vast number of these new words were culled from social media and street talk, and will likely have old-school Scrabble players scratching their heads.

‘Devo’ is in there – but in this case it’s short for ‘devastated; not the name of an 80s electronic band. Also allowed in abbreviated form are recently-evolved slang words such as ‘obvs’ (for obvious, obviously…), ridic (ridiculous), wuz (was), vape (vaporiser), lotsa, and a host of exclamations (blech, eew, grr, waah, yeesh).

That’s gotta be bad news for old-school Scrabble players who (a) might have no idea what most of these new words mean, let alone that they exist, and (b) are partial to the traditional, less-cluttered English language.

There is good news, however, for folks who are quick to learn. Many of the abbreviations have ‘X’s and ‘Z’s in them, providing big points when these letters are put down on the board. Land ‘bezzy’ – short for best friend – on a triple word score, for example, and that’s 54 points.

Allegedly these new words are not added willy-nilly. Official ‘word investigators’ traipse everything from scientific journals to social networking sites, song lyrics to popular fiction for all that is hot, hip and happening in language and communication.

Says Helen Newstead – the head of language content at Collins (Scrabble’s publishers) – “We consider electronic citations carefully before adding new words, but we’re certainly in a new and exciting era for recording a wider variety of English usage than ever before.”

Other new words that made the cut into the 2015 version of Scrabble are ‘onesie’, ‘twerking’, ‘schvitz’ (to sweat), ‘hacktivist’, ‘facetime’ and ‘tuneage’.

It’s awesome just thinking about this large number of additions to the English version of Scrabble. Imagine, then, all the additions to the many versions of the game in other languages?  Antonino Tati

The new Collins Official Scrabble Words is out June 1, RRP $39.99.