New Scrabble Game to Allow Proper Nouns

This morning, BBC News reported that a new release of wordsmith board game Scrabble will allow proper nouns. These words, such as a person's first name or the name of a city, have long been disallowed since they generally do not appear in dictionaries. This story incited a lot of interest, with many people wondering whether this game would make an official change to Scrabble's rules. Scrabble's been around a long time, why change the game now?

The Scrabble you know and love isn't changing. Only a new version due for release this July, called Scrabble Trickster, is allowing the use of proper nouns. If you live in the United States or Canada, you won't even see this game. Scrabble Trickster is a version being released only by Barbie manufacturer Mattel, who hold licensing rights for Scrabble in the UK. Here in the United States (and in Canada) those rights are held by Hasbro.

According to Daniel Terdiman's blog post at tech news outlet Cnet, Scrabble Trickster will allow more Scrabble taboos than just proper nouns. The game will also allow players to spell words backwards and steal letters, adopting an "anything goes" style as a contrast to the rigid rule set of standard Scrabble. A spokeswoman for Mattel told BBC News that Scrabble Trickster is designed to draw in younger fans, and to encourage family play. The standard version of Scrabble isn't particularly welcome to either; Scrabble has long been considered a nerd's game, right up there with chess and Risk. Bending the rules a little might make the game more accessible to people without a particularly strong vocabulary.

Bending the rules is precisely what people are so upset over, however. Scrabble has been played for more than half a century, having been created by Alfred Mosher Butts during the Great Depression and eventually released in 1948. Since its inception, proper nouns have been unwelcome in Scrabble - just like single letters, foreign words and profanity. Only words contained in a standard dictionary are considered "legal" choices, and even then there are some exceptions. The game is commonly played with a dictionary handy for players to "challenge" each other over words that may not be kosher. Suddenly allowing the use of proper nouns would shake the foundations of the Scrabble rule set.

BBC News' article about the story caused some initial confusion, leading many to believe that the rules of Scrabble would be changing completely upon release of Scrabble Trickster. Scrabble is played competitively around the world, so any amendment to the rules would cause a large ripple among those tournament players. Stefan Fatsis, writer of a book about competitive Scrabble play called "Word Freak" denounced the BBC story as "bad reporting" on his Twitter page. The BBC News article had already been edited by the time I had the opportunity to read it, and it remains unclear whether the original incarnation of the article had been more misleading about changes to Scrabble's rules. Regardless of any misrepresentation by BBC News, Scrabble rules for all versions apart from the upcoming Scrabble Trickster will not feature the allowance of proper nouns as acceptable words.

Sources:

Proper nouns come into play in Scrabble rule change. BBC News.

Daniel Terdiman. The sky isn't falling: Scrabble rules aren't changing. Cnet.

Stephen Fatsis' response to BBC story. Twitter.

About Scrabble. Hasbro.

About Alfred Mosher Butts. Hasbro.