Played on the board's top row, ending at the top right through an existing 'u,' and a player can score 401 points, including the 50-point 'bingo' bonus for using all seven tiles. 'It is going to be a big step'Īmong the highest potential scorers among the new additions is 'quinzhee,' a shelter made by hollowing out a pile of snow. 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 capitalization, can't have hyphens or apostrophes and can't be an abbreviation, in addition to being two to eight letters, reflecting the seven tiles players draw plus an eighth already on the board they can attach a long word to for bonus points. Definitions are kept to a minimum but parts of speech and whether a plural is available are noted. The new words add about 40 pages to the Scrabble-sanctioned dictionary, which already lists more than 100,000 playable words. But it's a rare word starting with 'q' that doesn't require a 'u.'Ī bonus, to a word nerd like Sokolowski: qajaq is a palindrome, though that's inconsequential in Scrabble. Qajaq, he said in a recent interview with Daniel, reflects the Inuit roots of kayak and would require a blank tile since Scrabble sets include just one Q. He's a lexicographer and editor at large for the Springfield, Mass.-based Merriam-Webster. One woman's te is another man's 'qajaq,' one of Peter Sokolowski's favourites among the new words.

The more two-letter words we have, the more possibilities a word will fit.' 40 new pages of words I call those the amino acids of Scrabble. 'Sometimes you play parallel to a word and you're making two-letter words along the way. '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. 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. Entries in the forthcoming book that include texter, vlog, bromance, hashtag, dubstep and selfie were mere twinkles on the racks of recreational players.īut it's the addition of te and three other two-letter words - da, gi and po - that has Robin Pollock Daniel excited. The dictionary's last freshening up was a decade ago.

Meet Victor: the trash-talking, Scrabble-playing robot.

LISTEN | Should Scrabble accept new slang?.

QUIZ | Do you know what these new Canadian Scrabble words mean?.

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, out Aug. To Scrabble fanatics, big gifts sometimes come in small packages.

Is te a scrabble word