Thirty-two-year-old Santacruz resident Hriday Samtani can’t wait to get Botox. On his Scrabble rack, that is.
Containing the high-scoring “power tile” ‘X’, this five-letter modernism is among 1,816 freshly added words, including ‘Tomoz’ (tomorrow), ‘Yeet’ (to throw with force), ‘Boujee’ (luxurious in lifestyle, humble in character), and ‘Peng’ (very beautiful) that have injected the board game’s official dictionary with Gen Z vigour.
“It’s exciting to see the lexicon evolving with modern slang and cultural shifts,” says Samtani, who is looking forward to playing words like ‘Yeet’ and ‘Peng’ at MuSigma KSSA Indian Open. To be held in Bangalore from Jan 23 to 26, 2025, the tentpole event, which sees scrabblers from across the globe battling it out across four divisions, will be first tournament in India to embrace additions to Collins Scrabble dictionary, which was last updated in 2020.
Featuring a slew of Hindi terms, the update animate desi champs such as Samtani for whom the language was his favourite subject in school. “Kanjus. Kamchor. Samaj. Janta,” rattles off national fourth-ranker Samtani, listing the new entrants which – when strung like that – make him sound like a troll commenting on “lazy, bench-warming” masses. Except, in the deviant 225-square grid world of Scrabble, words have no meaning. They are merely spellings with numbers.
“While some of the Hindi words are completely new like ‘Kamchor’, for many other words, an alternate spelling (‘Kunjoos’) was valid earlier,” clarifies 14-year-old Madhav Kamath, India’s top-rated youth scrabbler. “The additions clear up any confusion I’d have on the spellings while playing,” says Kamath, to whom the updated dictionary seems “one-third Indian and one-third Japanese or Korean”.
If the “delayed” addition of a few Greek words like ‘Threnoi’ and ‘Sekoi’ surprised him because “Greek is an ancient language”, terms belonging to the language of the future too threw – ahem – yeeted him.
Apart from “high-probability bingos” (7-letter words) such as ‘Xennial’ & ‘Zoodles’, additions include ‘Esport’, ‘Gastro’, ‘Vacay’ & other words that scrabblers thought were valid earlier. If Kamath is happy to see some of the words that he “phonied” in the past – ‘Fam’, ‘Loc’, ‘Derp’, ‘Nerf’, ‘Sitch’, ‘Vibed’ – being legitimised, ‘Fam’, short for family, Samtani feels, was an addition long overdue.
More than remembering new words, unlearning those that have been deleted is trickier, say players. In 2020, while NASPA removed 259 offensive slurs from their official word list, Mattel ousted 419 words from Scrabble dictionary in a move against hate speech.
