“The latest edition [of Collins Official Scrabble Words] adds nearly 3,000 new words to the existing quarter of a million available to Scrabble players” said Robert Groves, the editor of the reference for the popular Scrabble board game. MySpace, Wiki, gobi, alu, aloo, and keema are among the new words added to the scrabble dictionary.
Groves called the new words “an eclectic mix of new technological jargon, overseas English, recent colloquialisms, street slang, and a few fairly well established phrases that had not made it onto the list until now.” Staff at Collins Dictionary in Glasgow, Scotland created the list for the updated Collins scrabble dictionary, which publishers call “the most comprehensive Scrabble word list ever produced.”
Groves noted that over 50 percent of British households have the Collins Official Scrabble Dictionary, four million new games are sold ever year, and almost anybody that has played the game has turned to its official scrabble word list to settle the inevitable good natured disputes, which of course arise most often as the game comes to a close and the scores are close.
Groves said that in order to compile the additions to the new list staff reviewed dictionaries going back to 2006, and also used the Collins Corpus, “the world’s largest language database of written and spoken English.”
“It’s like the ‘bible’ really, for Scrabble players. It’s what we use to avoid any major arguments. It’s fundamental, really”, said Mark Nyman, who noted that the Collins dictionary is generally used everywhere in Canada and the United States where Websters is also used. The forty-four year old Nyman, who lives in Knutsford in Cheshire, said he is going to Poland this October to try to win the world championship again.
