Yeesh (officially OK), in news to make you want to twerk (also officially OK), the Scrabble dictionary has been expanded to include 6, 500 new words. And boy does it have a finger on modern day living.
The new list of words that will be OK to play (to the chagrin, one expects, of that rules stickler in your family that rules Scrabble with an iron fist) includes the likes of sexting, facetime, cakeage, bezzy (best friend), onesie (one-piece outfit) and vape (to puff an e-cigarette).
The game bases its changes on the Collins Dictionary, and in the past has been updated every five years. This has been changed to three years this time – a reflection of how language totes changes fast these days.
Scrabble purists may be aghast at the new inclusions, however as some have noted, they reflect how technology and pop culture have influence our language and the way we live now.
“The Internet age has revolutionised the inclusion of slang in dictionaries and Collins’ ‘Official Scrabble Words’ is no exception,” Helen Newstead, head of language content at Collins told The Daily Mail of the additions.
“Now people use slang in social media posts, tweets, blogs, comments, text messages, you name it, so there’s a host of evidence for informal varieties of English that simply didn’t exist before.”
For the Scrabble strategists wondering (you know who you are) the new words with the highest score are “quinzhee”, an inuit snow shelter, and “schvitz”,the Yiddish term to sweat.