If you’ve always struggled playing Scrabble because maybe your vocabulary just isn’t that expansive, consider the board game more enjoyable. The iconic game just added 300 new words to its official dictionary including “ew” and “ok.” (That “K” tile is worth 5 points!)
“OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time,” lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster, told the Associated Press. “Basically two- and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game.”
Sokolowski said they consulted the North American Scrabble Players Association before updating their book “to make sure that they agree these words are desirable.”
Other newcomers include aquafaba, yowza, zen, beatdown, zomboid, twerk, sheeple, wayback, bokeh, botnet, emoji, facepalm, frowny, hivemind, puggle and nubber. But none of those are Sokolowski’s favorites. He prefers newbies “macaron” and “ew.
“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,” he said.
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Sokolowski told the AP that before Merriam-Webster put out the first official Scrabble dictionary over 40 years ago in 1976, the game’s rules called for any desk dictionary to be consulted. Since an official dictionary was created, it has been updated every four to eight years.
