Last Updated on October 23, 2023
Good news for players of a classic word game: The next edition of the Scrabble Dictionary will add 300 words ready to be played.
If I were a fan of Scrabble, I’d be delighted by the news that the Scrabble Dictionary will soon be 300 words thicker.
You’d think, after all, that someone who loves words and grammar as much as I do would be a huge fan of the game.
Honestly, I’m not. I find it far more difficult than I think it should be, for reasons I’ve never been able to fully grasp. I think I have a fairly healthy vocabulary, but for some reason, I feel like my vocabulary drops to near zilch as soon as those little letter tiles line up on the rack in front of me.
Maybe I’d like the game more if I had that many more words to be able to play, since, according to official rules, a word has to be in the official Scrabble Dictionary to be considered a valid play.
Some of the words, like emoji and facepalm, are commonly-used words in social media.
Others, like muggle and sriracha, are popular in pop culture. (Though how anyone would remember how to spell sriracha without looking would have my respect.)
The most surprising of the words I’m seeing going in is ew, an interjection that expresses disgust. There are already more than 100 two-letter words, so you would think that one would already have been among them. I’m sure I must have used that word before when I’ve played in the past.
Of course, if your opponents don’t have that Scrabble Dictionary in their hands to second-guess your every move, you can get away with such a word even before it makes its way to the big book.
Still, it’s important for classic games like Scrabble that have entertained generations to keep up with the times; you can’t continue to attract younger players if you tell them upfront that you won’t acknowledge the words that are common to their own generation.
Is az a word in the new dictionary?
I don’t have a copy, but from what I can tell, it doesn’t appear to be.