Twerk, emoji and facepalm among 300 new words added to Scrabble dictionary

Three hundred new words have been added to the Scrabble dictionary including twerk, emoji and yowza.

The sixth edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary has been released by Merriam-Webster and include some long-awaited gems such as ew and OK, alongside others including facepalm.

“OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time,” lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at Merriam-Webster said. “Basically, two and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game.”

Qapik – a unit of currency in Azerbaijan – has also been added to the bank of 20 playable words beginning with the letter ‘q’ which do not need a ‘u’ following it.

There are a few more high scorers added to the dictionary, including bizjet, and some ideal for vowel dumping, such as arancini – Italian balls of cooked rice.

Bizjet, meaning a small plane used for business, would be worth 120 points on an opening play, but only if it is made into a plural.

That is due to the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles and the double word bonus space usually played at the start.

The US dictionary company sought counsel from the North American Scrabble Players Association when updating the book, Mr Sokolowski said, "to make sure that they agree these words are desirable".

Merriam-Webster put out the first official Scrabble dictionary in 1976. Before that, the game's rules called for any desk dictionary to be consulted.

Speaking about his favourite entries, Mr Sokolowski added: “I think ew is interesting because it expresses something new about what we're seeing in language, which is to say that we are now incorporating more of what you might call transcribed speech.

"Sounds like ew or mm-hmm, or other things like coulda or kinda.

"Traditionally, they were not in the dictionary but because so much of our communication is texting and social media that is written language, we are finding more transcribed speech and getting a new group of spellings for the dictionary."

Some foreign words have been accepted into English to the degree that they are playable, for example schneid, which has German roots and is a sports term for a losing streak.

Other new acceptable words are aquafaba, beatdown, zomboid, sheeple, wayback, bokeh, botnet, frowny, hivemind, puggle and nubber.

Additional reporting by Press Association.