Selfie, Hashtag among new entries in Scrabble Players Dictionary
The word "te" as a variant of "ti", the seventh tone on the musical scale, is a hardworking little gem among 5,000 words added to The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary due to be released next Monday by Merriam-Webster.
The word "te" as a variant of "ti", the seventh tone on the musical scale, is a hardworking little gem among 5,000 words added to due to be released next Monday by Merriam-Webster.
The dictionary's last freshening up was a decade ago. Entries in the forthcoming book that include texter, vlog, bromance, hashtag, dubstep and selfie were mere twinkles on the racks of recreational players.
But it's the addition of te and three other two-letter words — da, gi and po — that has Robin Pollock Daniel excited. Daniel, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, is a champion of the North American Scrabble Players Association, which has a committee that helps Merriam-Webster track down new, playable words of two to eight letters.
"Being able to hook an 'e' underneath 't' means that I can play far more words," explained Daniel, who practices Scrabble two to four hours a day. "Sometimes you play parallel to a word and you're making two-letter words along the way. I call those the amino acids of Scrabble. The more two-letter words we have, the more possibilities a word will fit."
One woman's te is another man's qajaq, one of Peter Sokolowski's favorites among the new words. He's a lexicographer and editor at large for the Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster.
To be included in the 36-year-old book - this is the fifth edition - a word must be found in a standard dictionary, can't require capitalisation, can't have hyphens or apostrophes and can't be an abbreviation, in addition to being two to eight letters.
Among the best potential scorers among the additions is quinzhee, a shelter made by hollowing out a pile of snow. End at the board's top right through an existing "u", it can score 401 points, including the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles.