If you’re planning to keep yourself entertained with a game of Scrabble this stormy bank holiday weekend, you may well be a step closer to victory now that a slew of new words are officially accepted by the game.
One of the most controversial additions is – perhaps surprisingly – the addition of “OK”, one of the most common words in the English language. It should technically be excluded from the Scrabble dictionary for being both capitalised and an abbreviation (of “orl korrect”).
Brett Smitheram, the 2016 world Scrabble champion, told talkRADIO yesterday: "If you ask the majority of English speakers do you recognise the two letters 'ok', they do. If you asked them do you recognise what it stands for, they wouldn't. So that's part of the definition of what makes this a word."
As well as “OK”, Scrabble added two other two-letter words: “ew”, an expression of disgust, and “ze”, the gender-neutral pronoun.
These were among the 2,862 new words that were added to the existing 276,000 Scrabble-approved words. Other new additions include “manspreading”, “bae”, “genderqueer”, “fatberg” and “fleek”.
Scrabble was devised by American architect Alfred Mosher Butts who worked on it during a period of unemployment after he was made redundant in the mid-1930s.
In 1948 however, a social worker called James Brunot acquired the rights and began manufacturing the game, which would become hugely popular.
Last year Scrabble celebrated its 70th anniversary. An estimated 150m copies of the game have been sold worldwide.
