The brand-new, seventh edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) is now out, and has been embiggened with 500 new words — including embiggen, pranayama, fauxhawk, and eggcorn. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Scrabble Words Are a Language Snapshot”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. The brand new seventh edition of the official Scrabble Players Dictionary is now out, and Grant has been embiggened with 500 new words.
Embiggened. Is that one of the words they added?
It is indeed. You can play embiggened now.
What else did they add?
Well, there are all kinds of great words that you can play now. You can play yama, which is the yogic practice of controlling your breath. And it added egg corn.
Oh, egg corn. That’s a great linguistics term. That’s when you mishear something, but you mishear it as something that sounds very reasonable.
Exactly. Like, for example, somebody says, oh, it was spreading like wildflowers. You know, the correct phrase is spreading like wildfire, but spreading like wildflowers is a lovely image.
And also, one of the really high-scoring words that you could play with this new official dictionary is the word fauxhawk.
Fauxhawk. Oh, I think I had that in my dictionary that I put out in 2006.
This is, it’s not a real mohawk, but it’s your haircut where it sticks up in the middle.
Well, we do love talking about dictionaries, and we love talking with you about language.
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