Board game stans rejoice, for the adorbs Scrabble dictionary has embiggened the number of playable terms.
This week, the Merriam-Webster dictionary released the seventh edition of its Scrabble Players Dictionary, the official referee on what words are eligible in the popular game, with 500 new words.
Some of the expanded lexicon included terms initially popularised in slang, such as adorbs (adorable), amirite (am I right) and bae (loosely, babe). Others stem from the world of current affairs, such as subtweet and vax.
Several food items including queso, guac and matcha were also included.
The newest dictionary also expanded words from foreign languages that are frequently used in English, reported the Associated Press. Carnitas and horchata, both Spanish words, are now playable; as is iftar, the meal eaten at sundown by Muslims during Ramadan.
The dictionary did come with some surprising additions. For example, dumpster, previously categorized as a trademark, is now a noun.
Scrabble officials have also made verb a verb, which means players can now play tense changes such as “verbing”.
“If I had to pick a favorite one, it would be the verbing of verb, because it’s a linguistic phenomenon that has real consequences in the game,” Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, told the Washington Post. “We’re recording that [phenomenon], and now it’s playable.”
Other nouns that have gotten the verb treatment include adult and spitball.
“So much about the new words for SCRABBLE are consequences of the way dictionaries classify words,” tweeted the dictionary’s official account. “A grammatical distinction that allows for new plays.”
The expansion of the dictionary is a new opportunity for Scrabble enthusiasts and word nerds alike to score more points in an average game.
“There’s so many more opportunities to play a little differently because of these new words,” the Toronto-based Scrabble expert Robin Pollock Daniel, 60, told the Post.
The highest-ranked female in North America, Daniel added: “It makes Scrabble one of the most exciting games that there are out there because it’s dynamic and constantly changing.”
This is the first addition of words since 2018 when the last edition of the dictionary was published.
