Scrabble accepts 2,862 new words as it includes terms such as sharenting, blud and BAE in its latest dictionary
- Youth culture, politics and current affairs have all influenced the words
- Manspreading, sharenting and blud all make the list in phrases being used
- ‘Aquafaba’ is among the high scoring words in the new dictionary
Sharenting, blud and BAE are among the words to be added to the board game Scrabble.
The youth culture slang phrases are counted among the list of 2,862 words, which have been updated for the first update since 2015.
Dictionary publisher Collins, which compiles the list, has also included ‘manspreading’ – when a man spreads his legs in public.
Collins looks at terms from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the US and UK and includes new words based on trends and spikes in usage.
Point scoring: 2,862 new words have been added to the Scrabble dictionary
Reflecting this, the word ‘incel’ – involuntary celibate – has made the list, as has ‘antivaxxer’ and ‘dox’ – to share someone’s personal information online.
Political analysis has introduced the term ‘post-truth’ and, perhaps influenced by hit BBC series Bodyguard, the Russian word ‘kompromat’ has made the list.
It refers to potentially compromising documents and photographs. The offence of ‘upskirting’ is another addition to the Scrabble repertoire.
Manspreading also makes it on the list of new words on the board game
Political phrases such as ‘Antifa’ – to describe an anti-fascist movement – and ‘Remainer’ and ‘omnishambles’ – a mismanaged situation – have also been added.
Among the more high-scoring new words is ‘aquafaba’, a vegan replacement for egg whites.
Other trendy food added include pork paste ‘nduja’, spicy sauce ‘sriracha’ and ‘matcha’ – Japanese green tea.
Helen Newstead from Collins, said: ‘We select new words by looking for language trends and spikes in usage in the Collins Corpus, a six-billion-word database of the English language, and gender identity is one of the areas that has seen an increase in the number of new words.’
The official Scrabble Words list for 2019 has added the new entries to the existing 276,000 accepted words.
They also include ‘transperson’, ‘genderqueer’ and ‘cisgender’ to reflect the changes in gender identity in a new catalogue of acceptable words to reflect ‘many areas of contemporary life’.
The term ‘transphobia’ – to describe someone who is prejudiced against transgender people – and ‘misgender’ – referring to someone as the wrong gender – have also been included.