Bezzy, shizzle, lolz and ridic are legitimate words — at least if you’re playing Scrabble.
Sure, if you type them in a Word document, your spellcheck underlines them in red as misspellings, but they could win you some serious points in a game of Scrabble. They are part of a list of 6,500 new entries to “Collins Official Scrabble Words,” the Scrabble bible, which contains more than 276,000 permissible Scrabble words.
The newly added words are “influenced by all parts of life including social media, slang, technology and food, plus English from around the world,” Collins Dictionary explained in a blog post.
Some of the new entries include: geocache, lotsa, tweep, twerking, sexting, facetime, hashtag, emoji, ixnay, onesie, waah, vape and tuneage.
“Yeesh” (11 points), that’s “lotsa” (5 points) new words to remember.
Although some Scrabble enthusiasts have embraced the new words because they’re reflective of how people speak and write, other players believe that “a word that’s not in the dictionary isn’t missing — it just shouldn’t be used,” The Washington Post reports.
“You might as well change the rules of Scrabble entirely and ALLOW PEOPLE TO MAKE WORDS UP,” Lady FOHF tweeted.
World Scrabble champion Craig Beevers told NPR that he’s never heard of many of the new Scrabble entries, but many are simply a reflection of our culture.
“There will always be words people don’t like, but all you can ask of a dictionary is consistency,” Beevers said. “Language continues to evolve and so Scrabble and its word bible must keep up, too.”
Helen Newstead, head of language content at Collins, told the BBC that their word list, which was last updated in 2011, is based on evidence of word use.
“Dictionaries have always included formal and informal English, but it used to be hard to find printed evidence of the use of slang words,” Newstead said. “Now people use slang in social media posts, tweets, blogs, comments, text messages — you name it — so there’s a host of evidence for informal varieties of English that simply didn’t exist before.”
If you don’t like the new words, that’s too bad. They’re in the official Scrabble bible now, so you’re really left with no option but to shut your cakehole (17 points).
What do you think of the new Scrabble words? Share your comments below.
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