'Jugaad', bae, OK: New words land on the Scrabble board

At 50, Varisht Hingorani knows he is too old to start calling his wife 'bae'. This young noun for sweetheart sounds proper in his Juhu house only when it rolls off the laidback Gen Z tongues of his son Vihaan, 20 and daughter Vedika, 16. From July 1 this year, though, age can't prevent Hingorani - a cheerful radiologist-from non-verbally dropping this slang term or even from hoping to score with it. That's the day competitive Scrabble players like him the world over will embrace 'bae' as a legitimate noun, make peace with 'Instagram' as a verb and rid 'facepalm' of its need to cling to a hashtag.

These young terms are among 2862 new words that were recently inducted into the official dictionary for the World English Language Scrabble Players Association published by Collins. Under normal circumstances, such an update - which happens about as frequently as the Olympics and which validated words such as 'devis' and 'dosas' when it last took place in 2015 - would see the Indian Scrabble community feverishly counting its new verbal blessings of vowels, consonants, anagrams and precious 50-bonus-points-worth bingo word possibilities. Right now, however, these serious tile-rattlers are avoiding this fresh glossary with superhuman zeal.

"If we look, we just might remember the words," says Sherwin Rodrigues, a top-ranking player, articulating the fear of his tribe that is busy prepping for the national scrabble championship on May 31 where the new list won't apply. It's vital to keep the blinkers on till then because playing the not-yet-valid words would mean earning negative points.

What they are missing out on is fun. Besides progressive gender neutral pronouns such as 'Ze' that would please the LGBTQ community, the new list also hugs a host of Indian words. Apart from Hindi terms 'jugaad', 'swachh', 'dhaba', 'gyan', and 'pradhan', the dictionary also welcomes the Hinglish 'sidhuism'.

For Romilla Thakur of the Pune Scrabble Club, 'pradhan' is special. "It is an anagram of hardpan," says Thakur, a senior citizen whose system has not only internalised tech terms like 'vlog' (or V Log, as she calls it) and 'WiFi' in the past but also 'Zyzzyva' (an insect) as a way of warding off dementia. Like the other above-60 members of her club, Thakur too, has perfected the art of mugging up scrabble words without getting caught up in their meanings.

Playability often trumps semantics for this tribe whose inhabitants include one Pramit who signs his name as 'Armpit'. While snooty English professors may find these unruly, awkward words impoverishing, inhabitants of this deviant world of Scrabble find that words such as as 'vax' (short for vaccination) and 'zens' nourish their emboidered tile bags by opening up ways to use the high-scoring 'X' and 'Z' tiles. "Before this update, no other power tile would go above the letter 'e' and no other two-letter word would end in 'k'," points out reigning champion Nakul Prabhu, unpacking the hidden potential of this year's two-word additions such as 'Ze' and 'OK'.

Citing the example of Thai players - who don't speak English but have mastered the game - Hingorani says it's possible to view scrabble less as language and more as Math but in the interest of knowledge, the doctor prescribes a less clinical view. "It's more fun when you accept the words without judgement," says Hingorani, who has felt enriched by vowel-free scrabble words like 'Crwth' - a Welsh term. In another earlier update, scrabble players made friends with a host of unpronounceable Maori terms from New Zealand like 'Tauiwi' and 'Rauriki' besides casual American slangs such as 'za', which means pizza. "This forces you to keep up with the times," says Hingorani, who was so excited on spotting 'gazpacho' - worth a whopping 25 points - on a restaurant menu that he felt compelled to order the cold Spanish soup.

Generally, a new list is accompanied by a list of deleted words and forgetting, players admit, is tougher than remembering. Of the 29 words deleted this year, Singapore-based Michael Tang - who will be the tournament director for the Scrabble World Championship in Goa this year - finds the omission of 'Gibibyte' particularly interesting given that its digital cousins 'Kibibyte', 'Mebibyte', 'Pebibyte' and 'Tebibyte' are still valid.

Given that chance plays a big role in the board game that was built by an architect named Alfred Mosher Butts, the new list is not bound to change the game all that much. "The longer words don't really get used. And there are a total of 617 small words this year, which in an ocean of words in a game where you have 10 moves to win - isn't a big sum," says Chennai-based lawyer Ranganathan Chakravarthy, a top-ranking player who teaches scrabble in Chennai schools. Visibly irked by the nation's lack of progress, especially in Scrabble's youth league, the 47-year-old wishes India would take the game as seriously as China does but here, "people think it's like Ludo," he says.