With today’s release of the sixth edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary – an important tome in any family home – the folks at Merriam-Webster have single-handedly set out to besmirch the noble game of Scrabble, with the addition of 300 words, a number of which are not words, fuck off, no.
New words that PEDESTRIAN.TV wholly approve of include this string of delicious foods I often have trouble spelling: the spicy Thai ‘sriracha’, Korean dish ‘bibimbap’, a yummy French ‘macaron’, and the Italian risotto balls that constitute too much of my diet, ‘arancini’.
And then there’s the bullshit online youth culture words like ’emoji’, ‘twerk’, ‘hivemind’, ‘sheeple’ and ‘facepalm’. No. ‘Yowza’? Seems like a cheat word to get rid of a ‘Y’ and a ‘Z’.
Other new words include two-letter words ‘OK’ and ‘ew’, then ‘frowny’, ‘botnet’, ‘puggle’, ‘beatdown’, ‘wayback’, ‘schneid’, ‘cotija’ and ‘zomboid’, which is definitely not a word. You don’t know what ‘schneid’ and ‘cotija’ are either? ‘Schneid’ is a word with German roots which means a losing streak, while ‘cotija’ is a type of Mexican cheese.
By adding ‘qapick’, a unit of currency in Azerbaijan, there are now 20 words you can play if you’ve got a ‘Q’ but no ‘U’, which y’know, fine, that’s neat. They’ve also added ‘bizjet(s)’, which could theoretically score you 120 points, and should also not be a word, portmanteaus do not belong in Scrabble.
The Guardian spoke to lexicographer and Merriam-Webster editor, Peter Sokolowski, who is very pleased about the new ‘Q’-word, and also the new baby words.
OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time. Basically two- and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game.
Every time there’s a word with q and no u, it’s a big deal. Most of these are obscure.
He also said his fave of the new words is ‘macaron’ for reasons unrelated to Scrabble, probably related to his appetite: “I just like what it means.”
And yet, ‘quone’ remains nowhere to be seen.
