Searching for 300 Words – Can You Help?
Scrabble words! Even in the digital age, words have power. And words burst from social media and streaming video all the time. These words both record and enable the changes in our society, our dialogue and our country.
Who keeps track? Journalists. Politicians. Social scientists. But also people who have fun with words. Crossword puzzlers. And Scrabble players.
Today’s post is aimed at Scrabble players. It’s a call to help us find the complete list of new words, as recorded in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. And those are the 300 words which were added to the 6th Edition in 2018 to update the 5th Edition of 2014.
The dictionary compilers, in their wisdom, have been reluctant to publish the entire list, perhaps to increase sales of the 6th Edition. But this creates a problem for some customers such as Chris Ulicky. Chris owns a Large Print 5th Edition but is unable to update it to the 6th Edition – because a large print edition is not offered!
Chris would like to write in the modest number of new Scrabble words (~300, supposedly) into his large print dictionary. But to do that he needs a list of the words!
The Pace of Scrabble Words
The 5th Edition added “more than 5,000 words” to update the 4th Edition of 2005. And the 4th Edition added “more than 4,000 words” to update the 3rd Edition of 1995.
What can we conclude from the growth of entries, as documented by the dictionary mavens?
- 1995 to 2005: >4000 words. This is >400 words per year.
- 2005 to 2014: >5000 words. This is >556 words per year.
- 2014 to 2018: 300 words. This is only 75 words per year!
What’s going on here? The pace of Scrabble words has slowed down. But the dictionary makers apparently believe that the significance of new words has increased, even as their pace has slowed. Or, perhaps they think that words such as those featured on the 6th Edition cover will sell books. Those words are emoji, facepalm, bitcoin, listicle and “hundreds more!”
Why New Scrabble Words, Now? Help Us Search!
The astute follower of ArtChester.net who does not care about Scrabble will say, hey, two Scrabble blogs in a row, what gives?
The answer is, my readers speak, and I listen. For reasons mentioned above, reader Chris Ulicky would like to know all the words that the 6th Edition has added to the 5th Edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. The publishers claimed “300 new words.” Amazingly, Chris has diligently searched, and found 273 of them!
Chris has shared his list, to which I made a tiny contribution of 6 new words. And HERE is the list for you.
Can you add more words to this list? If so, please send them to artchester@sbcglobal.net and I will be happy to share them with Scrabble players far and wide.
Do you have some Scrabble new words to share with us? We welcome your contributions! Please add your comment below, or send a message to me through the Contact page.
Image Credit: Covers of 5th and 6th Editions of Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, photo by Art Chester
I love Scrabble. I have found another game that I loaded on my iPad that you might like. It is called Spell Tower.
Thanks, Robyn. I’ll put it on my “try out” list. I see from the reviews that Spell Tower has many passionate advocates (addicts?) though almost as many grumble about this or that. However, I’m still fond of non-electronic word games such as Scrabble with tiles you can actually pick up and handle!