The official Scrabble Dictionary has announced the addition of over 500 new words and variations, including words like “adorbs”, “vaxxed” and “fintech.”
Out this month, the add-ons in the seventh edition of “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” join more than 100,000 words of two to eight letters. The book was last updated in 2018 through a longstanding partnership between Hasbro and Merriam-Webster.
The new words include some trademarks gone generic — dumpster for one — some shorthand joy like guac, and a delicious display of more verb variations: torrented, torrenting, adulted, adulting, atted, atting (as in don’t at me, bro).
“We also turned verb into a verb so you can play verbed and verbing,” said Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, a smile on his face and a word-nerd glitter in his eye during an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.
Fauxhawk, a haircut similar to a Mohawk, is potentially the highest-scoring newbie, he said. Biggen, a verb meaning to increase in size, is among the unexpected. (Sample sentence: “I really need to biggen that Scrabble dictionary.”)
Compound words are on the rise in the book with deadname, pageview, fintech, allyship, babymoon and subtweet. So are the “uns,” such as unfollow, unsub and unmute. They may sound familiar, but they were never Scrabble official, at least when it comes to the sainted game’s branded dictionary.
The new Scrabble book includes at least one old-fashioned word that simply fell under the radar for years: yeehaw.
“Yeehaw is like so many of the older, informal terms. They were more spoken than written, and the gold standard for dictionary editing was always written evidence. So a term like yeehaw, which we all know from our childhood and in movies and TV, was something you heard. You didn’t read it that often,” Sokolowski said.
Yeehaw, meet bae, inspo, vibed and vibing, all new additions to the Scrabble dictionary. Ixnay, which was already in the book, has been promoted to a verb, so ixnayed, ixnaying and ixnays are now allowed.
Welp, thingie, roid, skeezy, slushee and hygge (the Danish obsession with getting cozy) also made the cut. So did kharif, the Indian subcontinent’s fall harvest.
The Merriam-Webster wordsmiths have added a slew of food-related words: iftar, horchata, kabocha, mofongo, zuke, zoodle, wagyu, queso and marg, for margarita, among them. Many Scrabble players couldn’t care less about definitions — only points — but informatively:
Iftar is a meal taken by Muslims at sundown to break the daily fast during Ramadan. Mofongo is a traditional Puerto Rican dish made of fried or boiled plantains. Horchata is a sweet drink and kabocha is a winter squash.
Zonkey joins zedonk among new words using a Z, one of the highest scorers in Scrabble along with Q (each has a face value of 10 points). The difference between those two wacky-sounding animals, you ask? A zonkey is sired from a male zebra and a female donkey. The parentage of a zedonk is the other way around. Zedonk even has a playable variation: zeedonk.
Zoomer, for a member of GenZ, is also new. Familiar with the Middle Eastern spice blend za’atar? A less common variant, zaatar, is now in the Scrabble dictionary. Words with apostrophes aren’t allowed.
And there’s more where all of that came from:Oppo, jedi, adorbs, dox variant doxxed, eggcorn (a misheard slip of the ear), fintech, folx (inclusive alternative to folks), grawlix, hangry, matcha, onesie, spork, swole, unmalted, vaquita, vax and vaxxed were added.
