300 new words have been added to the sixth edition of the Scrabble dictionary.
ADVERTISEMENTThree hundred new words have been added to the Scrabble dictionary including twerk, emoji and yowza.
The sixth edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary has been released by Merriam-Webster and include some useful words such as ew and OK.
“OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time,” lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at Merriam-Webster said. “Basically, two and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game.”
Here are just a few of the new additions:
Arancini: Italian balls of cooked rice
Bizjet: a small plane used for business.
Emoji: a small computer symbol used to express emotion.
Ew: used to express disgust.
Facepalm: to cover the face with the hand.
Listicle: a journalistic term for a short article based around a list (like this article!)
Puggle: a kind of dog (Beagle and Pug mixed).
Qapik – a unit of currency in Azerbaijan.
The US dictionary company asked for advice from the North American Scrabble Players Association when updating the book, Sokolowski said, "to make sure that they agree these words are desirable".
Merriam-Webster put out the first official Scrabble dictionary in 1976.
Speaking about his favourite entries, Sokolowski told reporters: “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."
A few foreign words have been accepted into English to the degree that they are playable, for example, schneid, which has German roots and is a sports term for a losing streak.