Scrabble for Meaning: Dictionaries may soon no longer have the last word

The recent TV advertisement campaign that featured a young man supposedly creating a new word - 'zoot' - during a game of Scrabble and then using his smartphone to popularise it to the extent that it became a de jure element in youth vocabulary, was not exactly original. Zoot suits, after all, were the almost comical style of men's suits that became trendy in the 1940s with salwar-like cuffed trousers and mid-thigh length jackets with padded shoulders and wide lapels. But the broader premise of the commercial - that any word can eventually become Scrabble-worthy provided it is widely used - appears to be borne out by the newest Collins compendium, the bible for aficionados of the boardgame in the non-American English speaking world.

Considering web-spawned jargon like grrl and myspace, street slang like innit and even diverse borrowed words from other languages like wiki ('fast' in Hawaiian) and gobi and aloo figure among the 3,000-odd new additions to the over 2.5 lakh already on the game's approved list, it is not unlikely that any random sequence of letters will soon suffice.

The fear, of course, is that with more and more new-fangled words entering the lexicon, young practitioners of the game will no longer feel the need to know star words of the existing vocabulary, including the 6,000 or so that exceed 15 letters. As the world becomes smaller, words from other languages leaching into Scrabblespeak will also increase. Take the word 'singhiozzerebbe' (third person singular of the Italian word singhiozzare, meaning 'to sob') that notched up 2,118 points on the online avatar of the game, Scrabulous. Maybe, it will make it to mainstream Scrabble one day as a soon-to-be-widely-used Indlish word meaning 'deniability when in high office'.