Scrabble Dictionary Gets a Radical Update

Hey “bae,” want to turn this “convo” into a Scrabble game over “margs”? If so, you’ll want to seek “inspo” from the seventh edition of the official Scrabble dictionary, which includes 500 new playable words, some of which break with the typical Scrabble rules. As CNN reports, abbreviations and words that are always capitalized aren’t generally allowed. But the new batch of words includes proper nouns “Google,” and “Boricua” and abbreviations “vax,” “guac,” “marg,” “inspo,” and “convo.” There are also some words that were previously overlooked, including “yeehaw” and “dumpster.”

Hasbro and Merriam-Webster have also added “jedi,” “onesie,” “spork,” “thingie,” “hygge,” “allyship,” “deepfake,” “pageview,” “subtweet,” “dox,” “pranayam,” “ambigram,” “stan,” and “welp” to The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary in its first update since 2018. There’s also “fauxhawk,” which the AP notes is “potentially the highest scoring newbie.” Some new words including the high-scoring letter “Z” are “zoodle,” “zoomer,” “zedock,” and “zonkey.” “Zuke,” “hangry,” “adorbs,” “sitch,” and “swole” are among new slang words. Several new additions also begin with “un,” such as “unfollow,” “unsub,” “unmute,” and “unmalted.”

New verb variations include “adulted” and “adulting,” “vibed” and “vibing,” and “ixnayed” and “ixnaying.” “We also turned verb into a verb so you can play verbed and verbing,” says Merriam-Webster Editor at Large Peter Sokolowski. In a statement, he notes the new words give players an opportunity to “up their game while celebrating the riches of the ever-expanding language.” He isn’t revealing all of the new additions, however, but instead encouraging players to find them out. A clue: quite a few are food- or drink-related. For example, “queso,” “matcha,” “slushee,” and “iftar” are now playable. (Read more Scrabble stories.)