Scrabble To Ban Slurs and Offensive Words

The updated “Official Scrabble Players Dictionary,” from Merriam Webster, contains “ew,” shown in this photo, in New York, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018, among more than 300 additions. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

I gotta say…I’m shocked this wasn’t a thing already!

I think we probably all agree that there are words that should not be used in a board game. The weight of those words overcome the accrual of arbitrary points. Perhaps we differ on where that line gets drawn, but I hope we all agree there is a line!

Scrabble looks to be covering all their bases and banning 238 words from its competition dictionary. The North America Scrabble Players Association has done this in the light of Black Lives Matter protests.

The NASPA’s official newsletter said, “It is not hard to unlearn 238 words (including inflections), none of which are high-probability, and all of which have offensive meanings that are easy to remember. Top-level players are occasionally called upon to do this already, to prevent offensive words from being broadcast or streamed.”

They said the words chosen appear in most dictionaries and tagged as offensive, and have no other non-offensive meaning.

Here’s the list of words, but it’s kinda funny what they did. Instead of just listing the words and further spreading instances of these words, they listed them, but then scrambled the letters. So yeah, you can probably figure out most of them.