Scrabble Has Added 500 New Words—Find Out What You Can Now Play
Updated: Jan. 25, 2023
Merriam-Webster has updated its official Scrabble dictionary with playable words like vax, guac, welp, vibing and others
Yeehaw, bae! Love your new fauxhawk thingie, it’s adorbs. I know you’re a Scrabble stan, so I hope you’re vibing the new sitch around the game board.
Bae, yeehaw, fauxhawk, thingie, adorbs, stan, vibing and sitch are just eight of the 500 words new Scrabble words added to the seventh edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, out this month. They will join more than 100,000 words from between two to eight letters. The book was last updated in 2018 and published through a partnership between Hasbro and Merriam-Webster.
According to CNN, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski said the new additions to the dictionary give players an opportunity to “up their game while celebrating the riches of the ever-expanding language.” Sokolowski added: “English speakers like to have fun with words, and no one does it better than Scrabble players, who make excellent use of words both obscure and common.”
In the last couple of years, according to the AP, 200-plus racial, ethnic and otherwise offensive words have been removed from the Scrabble lexicon. “That has prompted furious debate among tournament players,” said the AP. “Supporters of the cleanup called it long overdue. Others argued that the words, however heinous in definition, should remain playable so long as points are to be had.”
What new words have been added to Scrabble?
Many words that appear every day in texting and social media—but weren’t playable before—such as welp, convo, inspo, hangry, vaxxed and doxxed are now part of the dictionary.
New words include nouns that have turned into verbs, such as torrented, torrenting, adulted, adulting, atted, atting (as in don’t at me, bro)—and also verbed and verbing. Formerly trademarked words such as dumpster (like xerox, escalator, and google before it) have been added.
Americans know more food and drink terms these days, and many of those have been brought into the fold, including slushee, guac (short for guacamole) and marg (short for margarita).
Then there are some perhaps more obscure food words: iftar, mofongo, wagyu, kabocha, horchata, zaatar.
I want the big points. What Z, Q, and eight-letter words have been added?
Veterans who know their Scrabble facts will want to know what Z and Q words have been added. Those, of course, are the highest-scoring letters in the game. For Z, you can now play zoomer, zuke, zoodle, zedonk (or zeedonk), and zonkey (an animal sired from a male zebra and a female donkey). For Q, words like queso (cheese) and vaquita (a small porpoise) are now playable.
You can also play some new eight-letter words, the ones that help players clear their seven-tile racks for 50 extra points. Those are hogsbane (commonly known as giant hogweed) and pranayama (a breathing technique in yoga).
The complete list of Scrabble-friendly words can be accessed on Merriam-Webster’s Scrabble Word Finder.
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