Scrabble’s New Official Word List Contains Dozens of Stunning Additions. Elite Players Are Mortified.
Scrabble’s New Official Word List Contains Dozens of Stunning Additions. Elite Players Are Mortified.
The slurs are just the beginning.
So the article explains that official tournaments use a unique words list that contains a lot of generous words like "zzz" and "aa". Mostly intended to allow high scoring words for people who studied their list.
The company that maintains the list has added a lot more of these "not a real word but it scores high so we added it" words.
For some highlight words from the article: MIREPOIXS, HORSEFEATHERSES, SUBSPECIESES, GRATINEEED
Players are complaining that high level tournaments are basically going to be competitions for who knows the most gibberish from the tournament word list and it is alienating the general population from joining tournaments and scrabble clubs.
120MIREPOIXS, HORSEFEATHERSES, SUBSPECIESES, GRATINEEED
Did smeagol write this list?
79Truly, a win for mutant hobbits everywhere.
8
Shouldn't the official word list just be the dictionary? Isn't that the point?
40it is, the scrabble dictionary. a dictionary is just a collection of words there are hundreds of kinds. most house rules for scrabble require the word to be in a dictionary that's actually in the house or a pre-agreed on one online but at a tournament whose dictionary do you use? Well the scrabble tournament holders made their own and then modify that for local languages and such.
27Which dictionary? Merriam Webster added almost 700 "words" this year, including shit like: TTYL, finsta, bussin, cromulent, doggo, simp, goated, and more. I feel like they are slowly becoming urbandictionary.com.
12
I'm pretty sure the tournaments are just memorising lists. A man won the French competition without being able to speak French... He just memorised the accepted words.
28Words in scrabble should be things that people actually use outside scrabble. It's fair if that makes some leeway for slang. It's also fair if it means that some really obscure words that nobody really uses get in. But, this seems over the line because they're taking words that nobody uses, and tacking on un-grammatical endings.
19I’m amazed that they allow Zzz. It’s not really a word.
12My horsie has featherses, silly hobbitses
10The 10x number of new words added compared to previous editions, and the nonsensical nature of so many of the new entries, says it has to be AI. There's no way some of those would make it past a human editor (except one lazily accepting everything the AI suggests as truth).
8Those words seem to be particularly designed to make players unsure about challenges, so players can get away with playing more variations that aren't on the list.
1
I’m fine with adding slightly offensive words like ‘twat’ and ‘redneck’, but fake plurals like ‘feceses’ and ‘rouxes’ are absurd rules-lawyering.
63Spazzing for double points!
5
Well this is just a bunch of HORSEFEATHERSES
37It would be like playing with Gollum.
7
I vote games like scrabble don't use made up words just because they can give you big points. In that case why not just allow your players to place down all their letters in any random order and call it legal? It scores more points, so why not, Big Scrabble?
Also, I'm also personally against the use of made up slang words that started appearing around the 2010s and are now in common use, or at least were in common use.
17I think the point is rather that all words are made up. For the record you have my vote as well. I don't want nonsense words to be a part of the game, especially at tournament level.
14If thou wishes for thine language to remain unchanged, perhaps ye wish to speak thusly?
6But all words are made up words.
5I've considered when a word is no longer "made up".
There's always some enlightened centrist claptrap about "all words being made up", which I think even they know is pedantic and not really a solution.
Then you have the Websters who intentionally annoint words prematurely, I'm certain for marketings sake. Every year they get some free press about adding surprising words. I don't really know who buys dictionaries on a regular basis, but someone must, so they must want to appear modern and get some free advertising while they're at it. In Short, you have early adopters who want to appear hip, and that seems wrong, too.
Finally you have the hard-ass who doesn't want anything new added. In my experience these people just get off on gatekeeping and pearl clutching. They don't think that slang is worthy and they want to be part of the ingroup who decides which words are "real". In these peoples opinion, if they're being consistent, words like "legit" shouldn't be a word, it's just slang for legitimate. So that seems wrong.
I think the only answer is perhaps time. I feel like a word needs to live as long as the average person before becoming "official" (whatever that means). Like, who knows if in 79 years "bussin" will still be a usable word. But then again, useable by whom? If the issue with slang is that it's too new and therefor only understood by a narrow group of people, can't the same complaint can be applied to highbrow difficult words that are only understood by the overeducated? Or technical words in niche areas of understanding? Can you really say that more people can define metempsychosis, or kentledge, than can define edgelord, or doggo?
But even my time argument fails. Because what's the harm in adding words? We aren't bound by any space limitations or something. We don't run out of "word slots" and once they're all used we're stuck forever.
Long story short, I don't know what the answer is. But I do know that horsefeatherses isn't a word.
1
Well, my opinion that scrabble is one of the worst games ever made is now solidified.
12Scrabble is dumb because it's all about memorizing high scoring words from a list. As I recall, the guy who won the French Scrabble championships never even knew how to speak French.
11Some of these additions are just silliness. That said, I could barely make it through the article, as it kept just randomly starting a new sentence halfway through a thought.
It also referenced somebody, but then didn’t finish the sentence before moving on to talk about someone else. I have been annoyed by all the “this article was written by an ai” comments I’ve been seeing lately. Having read this article I see what people mean.
7I am stunned! Stunned, I say!
3