New Scrabble dictionary includes Jimmy Fallon's favourite word as well as text speak

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“‘OK’ is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time,” said lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster. “Basically two- and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game.”

There’s more good news in “qapik”, adding to an arsenal of 20 playable words beginning with q that don’t need a u. Not that Scrabblers care all that much about definitions, but a qapik is a unit of currency in Azerbaijan.

“Every time there’s a word with q and no u, it’s a big deal,” Sokolowski said. “Most of these are obscure.”

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There are some sweet scorers now eligible for play, including “bizjet”, and some magical vowel dumps, such as arancini, those Italian balls of cooked rice. Bizjet, meaning - yes - a small plane used for business, would be worth a whopping 120 points on an opening play, but only if it’s made into a plural with an s. That’s due to the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles and the double word bonus space usually played at the start.

The dictionary company sought counsel from the North American Scrabble Players Association when updating the book, Sokolowski said, “to make sure that they agree these words are desirable.”

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Sokolowski has a favourite among the new words but not, primarily, because of Scrabble scores. “It’s ‘macaron’,” he said, referring to the delicate French sandwich cookie featuring different flavours and fillings.

“I just like what it means,” he said.

Merriam-Webster put out the first official Scrabble dictionary in 1976. Before that, the game’s rules called for any desk dictionary to be consulted. Since an official dictionary was created, it has been updated every four to eight years, Sokolowski said.

There are other new entries Sokolowski likes, from a wordsmith’s view.

“I think ew is interesting because it expresses something new about what we’re seeing in language, which is to say that we are now incorporating more of what you might call transcribed speech. Sounds like ‘ew’ or ‘mm-hmm’, or other things like ‘coulda’ or ‘kinda’. Traditionally, they were not in the dictionary but because so much of our communication is texting and social media that is written language, we are finding more transcribed speech and getting a new group of spellings for the dictionary,” he said.

Like ew, there’s another interjection now in play, “yowza”, along with a word some might have thought was already allowed: “zen”.

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There’s often chatter around Scrabble boards over which foreign words have been accepted into English to the degree they’re playable. Say hello to “schneid”, another of the new kids, this one with German roots. It’s a sports term for a losing streak. Other foreign words added, mainly because they're so familiar they no longer require italics or quotation marks in daily use: bibimbap, cotija” and sriracha”.

Scrabble was first trademarked as such in 1948, after it was thought up under a different name in 1933 by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect in New York state. Interest in the game picked up in the early 1950s, according to legend, when the president of US department store Macy’s came across it while on holiday.

Now, the official dictionary holds more than 100,000 words. Other newcomers Sokolowski shared are aquafaba, beatdown, zomboid, twerk, sheeple, wayback, bokeh, botnet, emoji, facepalm, frowny, hivemind, puggle and nubber.

How well do you know what these new words mean? Take our quiz and find out!

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