New Lexicon for North America Coming

A new word list is coming, to be known as NWL2020, for club and tournament use in North America. There may be a few new words that aren’t on the site yet, but the main gist of this update is to remove a set of words deemed by a committee to meet the criteria for being sufficiently offensive. These words will only be removed for those using the North American lexicon (know as OWL or other variants in recent years).

Since my goal with the site is to maintain lexicons valid for club or tournament play around the world (mostly in English), the site will move to that list within a few weeks.

For a summary of what will be removed and other lists which one may find useful, please see this page at the Seattle Scrabble Club.

I’ll post an update in a few weeks when the update is live on the site.

–Ben

Author: benwood

Co-administrator of Chezmoi and Gladiators

3 thoughts on “New Lexicon for North America Coming”

  1. Awfully grumpy about this (the whole thing, not so much this site going with it, although I’m not happy about that). Why do we go with the wowsers? Since when does the Rest Of The World accept the standards of the narrow-minded American pearl-clutchers? (Remember a few years ago when someone in the US was fired for using the word “niggard”?
    For *word no longer exists* sake!)
    Further salt in the wounds: I can’t even say what I really think about the people who did this, because, apparently, the words I want to use are no longer in the language.

    1. Yes, I remember that incident, it was a park or museum ranger I think, and he used the term correctly.
      And I agree, it is a slippery slope… *sigh*

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