Under license from Hasbro Inc., Merriam-Webster will release the fifth edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, marking the dictionary’s first major update in nearly a decade. More than 5,000 new words will be added to the dictionary–including geocache, a word chosen by fans in the Scrabble Word Showdown earlier this year–making them all officially playable in the game. Players in the U.S. and Canada will now be able to rack up points with geocache and other words that have entered language recently, including beatbox, chillax, frenemy, hashtag, joypad, mixtape, mojito, ponzu, selfie, soju, sudoku, texter, vodcast, vlog, and yuzu.
Entries in the new fifth edition feature a brief definition, a part-of-speech label, and inflected forms. The new dictionary is endorsed by the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) for recreational and school use, and the new words from the fifth edition will be sanctioned for use in official club and tournament play on December 1.
Merriam-Webster’s fifth edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary will be available in paperback, hardcover, and large print formats in the United States and Canada wherever books are sold on August 6. Digital versions of the dictionary will be available for iOS, Android, and Kindle later this month. The dictionary will also be available to play later this year in the digital versions of the Scrabble game from Electronic Arts.
