I checked in with Bassett-Bouchard, who is now an interaction designer for Google, and he said he has no trouble with Words With Friends crossing the line and adding popular abbreviations to its lexicon. In fact, Words With Friends has occasionally organized competitions: In 2015, it held the Wordie Games, which attracted some top Scrabble players, including Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, who the year before had become the youngest-ever American Scrabble champion at the age of 24. That would be more of an issue if Words With Friends had real aspirations to be a competitive game with serious tournaments, like Scrabble. And you can’t really know if a word is currently playable unless you search for it in the game’s built-in dictionary or try playing it on the board. Inflections are generally a stumbling point for the Social Dictionary words: You now can play bae but not baes, bestie but not besties, swole (meaning “extremely muscular”) but not swoler or swolest. If BFF is acceptable, and it’s treated as a noun, then surely the plural BFFs should be playable too.
#What are abbreviations for words called free
As the name suggests, the game is supposed to be a social experience that you enjoy “with friends,” so why shouldn’t the limits of acceptable words be more free and easy?ĭespite this openminded attitude, it might be worth imposing a bit more consistency on the game’s new lexicon. Singh also acknowledged that the game developers are “not aiming to be most correct from a dictionary perspective.” This is another way that Zynga has set Words With Friends apart from the more lexically straitlaced Scrabble. “We want to make sure our player base is excited by these words. (Sorry, you can’t play OMG, LOL, WTF, BTW, or FYI just yet.) “We’re learning and evolving from talking to our players,” Singh said. “There are no hard and fast rules,” Singh told me-and when it comes to abbreviations, “Where do you stop?”įor now, there’s just a limited number of abbreviations included in the Social Dictionary, but Singh kept the door open to adding more. So how did BFF, FOMO, and TFW make the cut among the 50,000 new words? When the Social Dictionary was being created, there was no attempt to include all abbreviations.
You now can play bae but not baes, bestie but not besties. Interestingly, though, the Words With Friends suggestion form warns that they’re unable to add words from the traditional no-go categories: proper nouns, words with hyphens or apostrophes … and abbreviations. Every day, Zynga fields more than 5,000 suggestions for new words to make playable, and many of these have gone into the dictionary expansion. While Words With Friends has enough differences from Scrabble, such as the distribution of letters and point values, to keep them from being sued by Hasbro and Mattel, the “no abbreviation” rule has been one point of agreement shared by the two games-until now.Īccording to Gurpreet Singh, the product director of Words With Friends, the new Social Dictionary is one way that the game is responding to player feedback. The 174,000 words on the ENABLE list have served Words With Friends well over its eight-year history, ever since its first development by Newtoy (which was bought out by Zynga in 2010). and Canada, and Mattel elsewhere), became a popular word list for game-makers developing their own Scrabble spinoffs, including, in 2009, a little game called Words With Friends. ENABLE, free from the proprietary burdens imposed by Scrabble’s trademark holders (Hasbro in the U.S.
And when an open-source alternative to the Scrabble dictionary called ENABLE (an acronym for Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon) was released in 1997, it too considered abbreviations verboten. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, first published in 1978, has followed those instructions to the letter. As Stefan Fatsis, the author of the book Word Freak about the competitive Scrabble world, has noted, when the game was first marketed in 1948, the rules were spelled out right inside the box: “Any words found in a standard dictionary are permitted except those capitalized, those designated as foreign words, abbreviations, and words requiring apostrophes or hyphens.” Doesn’t including these abbreviations go against the spirit of games like Words With Friends that have Scrabble burned into their DNA? (And no, Zynga isn’t making DNA playable, at least not yet.)Īs the granddaddy of word-tile board games, Scrabble has long made clear what does and doesn’t count as a playable word. While trendy initialisms might make for good marketing material, purists raised on Scrabble might balk at the additions. 6 Months Inside One of America’s Most Dangerous Industries Michael Holtz
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