Looking forward to infuriating your relatives over the holiday? Sure, there are the tried and true ways, but brushing up on the 500 newly-accepted Scrabble words is more fun—and educational. Enjoy the double benefit of annoying everyone you play while also expanding your vocabulary. The newest edition of The Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary includes words that will boggle your opponents like bae, horchata, and deepfake. Or really start some family arguments with the big ticket letters in queso, juicery, zeedonk, and fauxhawk. Embiggen is also among the new words. Created in an episode of The Simpsons, it of course enjoyed a resurgence as Ms. Marvel’s catchphrase in this year’s Disney+ show.
The official dictionary is a partnership with Merriam-Webster, which updates their own dictionary every year. The Scrabble dictionary team hadn’t put together a refresher since 2018, leading to this huge list of new words. Everything from adulting to zonkey makes the grade, but they didn’t release a full list. This leaves it up to curious players to mine the new edition for ways to take down their opponents.
Thankfully, AP News did some of that research and reported dozens of the new words. Food and drink slang like guac and marg are on the list. As are Jedi and spork, which we can’t believe the official dictionary hadn’t already approved. Multiple words are now verbs, including verb itself. That means the -ing and -ed versions of at, torrent, vibe, and ixnay are fair game.
Scrabble players will have a quick learning curve and need to change with the linguistic times. And if you play other versions, like against a robotic opponent or as part of a digital board game table, you’ll need to update those dictionaries as well to unlock the 500 new words.
Melissa is Nerdist’s science & technology staff writer. She also moderates “science of” panels at conventions and co-hosts Star Warsologies, a podcast about science and Star Wars. Follow her on Twitter @melissatruth.
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