WIRED Media Group See the glossary. Prefer Collins? The company said it will also be updating the game's rules "to make clear that slurs are not permissible in any form of the game.". ... NASPA: North American Scrabble Players Association (Dallas, TX) NASPA: National Association of Systems Programmers: NASPA: National Association for Public Accountants: It is based on the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) with modifications to make it more suitable for tournament play.
Hasbro, which publishes Scrabble, told The New York Times that NASPA has "agreed to remove all slurs from their word list for Scrabble tournament play, which is managed solely by NASPA and available only to members." © 2020 Condé Nast.

In a letter to the association’s advisory board, NASPA CEO John Chew wrote: “I have felt for a long time that there are some words in our lexicon that we hang onto in the mistaken belief that our spelling them with tiles on a board strips them of their power to cause harm. Read our affiliate link policy. NASPA has compiled a list of offensive words that it proposes are removed from the word list, including the n-word, “bumboy”, “shemale”, “dyke” and “faggot”. For more information about SCRABBLE brand products or NASPA, or to comment on or correct the contents of this page, or to report technical difficulties in reading this page, please email us . Players in tournaments broadcast on ESPN have also been asked to avoid playing offensive words in the past.

NASPA Word List (NWL), (formerly Official Tournament and Club Word List, referred to as OTCWL, OWL, TWL), is the official word authority for tournament Scrabble in the USA and Canada. Club and tournament players, meanwhile, would continue to use an expanded word list that kept all offensive words as valid plays (this extremely NSFW list, which is more expansive than the list of slurs NASPA is considering, keeps track of all the tournament-playable words missing from the official dictionary). But after weeks of debate, NASPA's 12-person advisory board hasn't yet officially voted on the proposal to ban over 200 offensive slurs and variations from tournament play. The SCRABBLE trademark is owned by J.W.

NASPA Word List (NWL) Collins Scrabble Words (CSW, formerly SOWPODS) The NWL is the official Scrabble word source in the United States, Canada, Thailand, and Israel.

The proposed move is part of an effort by the group to "support Black Lives Matter and bring justice to our world," as organization CEO John Chew put it in a recent newsletter. WESPA chairman Chris Lipe said: “These are terrible words and you don’t want people coming in to be exposed to them if necessary.”, More: transphobia, Enter your email to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories, North American Scrabble Players Association. It was only natural for NASPA to generate their own word list, which is also known as NWL, which stands for NASPA Word List.

"The spoken word can be offensive," Connecticut player Benjamin Bloom said in an interview with Slate, but "a random string of tiles on a 15-by-15 Scrabble board should never offend anyone.". - Jul 8, 2020 3:57 pm UTC. NASPA is listed in the World's largest and most authoritative dictionary database of abbreviations and acronyms. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Ars Technica Addendum (effective 8/21/2018). For more information about SCRABBLE brand products or NASPA, or to comment on or correct the contents of this page, or to report technical difficulties in reading this page, please email us.

The Scrabble controversy follows last month's decision by Hasbro subsidiary Wizards of the Coast to ban seven Magic: the Gathering cards with racist imagery or connotations from tournament-level play. The rest of the English-speaking Scrabble world uses the Collins lexicon as the official word authority. Privacy policy. "I have felt for a long time that there are some words in our lexicon that we hang onto in the mistaken belief that our spelling them with tiles on a board strips them of their power to cause harm," Chew said in a message to the NASPA Advisory Board urging the removal. The SCRABBLE trademark is owned by J.W. slurs, All rights reserved. Imagine that an acronym within an acronym. The proposed move is …

Ad Choices. All rights reserved. Spear and Sons, PLC, a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc. outside of the United States and Canada. Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox. NASPA members have been discussing the proposed slur removal in a private Facebook group for weeks, with fervent arguments on both sides of the issue.

I saw in a comment here a few weeks backs where a linguist said ‘words don’t have meanings, they have uses.’, with 125 posters participating, including story author, collected words published in other major dictionaries. Obviously tournaments can have whatever rules but I figured Mattel/Hasbro would want to keep the image squeaky clean.

North American Scrabble Players Association,

Most people accept that without question. If NASPA votes to remove slurs from its wordlist later this week, the decision will go into effect in tournaments starting on September 1. The North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) seems poised to remove hundreds of offensive slurs from tournament-level Scrabble play.

Your California Privacy Rights | Do Not Sell My Personal Information “Some people find they cannot accept … the ‘n-word’ being treated as though it has no meaning. That's what happened in 2010, when a Cleveland area newspaper had to write an apology after using a photograph of a board from a local tournament containing a slur. You must login or create an account to comment. dictionary, I've always figured that like proper nouns, certain words would be out of bounds. Kyle Orland NASPA Zyzzyva is the word judge program of choice at major events such as the North American SCRABBLE Championship, the North American School SCRABBLE Championship, the Canadian National SCRABBLE Championship and the World SCRABBLE Championship, as well as at smaller events, clubs and gatherings around the world. NASPA publishes an obfuscated, anagrammed list of which offensive words fall into each category. racism,

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NASPA was developed to secure Scrabble competitions for adults in North America. As someone who really only played with family, I am actually surprised to see that 'offensive' words were ever allowed. NASPA is a privately held nonprofit with a license from Hasbro to use the word Scrabble and to oversee the club and tournament word list in the … Confused? Chew told Reuters: “We are told when we get for the first time to a Scrabble club or tournament that words have no meaning on a Scrabble board. The North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) is reviewing its official word list, and is set to decide this week whether to remove homophobic, transphobic and racist slurs.

(Karol Serewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty). Scrabble® Word Finder is a simple and easy to use Scrabble solver and helper website :-) It helps you find the best scoring words for scrabble, words with friends and other similar word games like Jumble words, Anagrammer, Wordscraper and so.. HASBRO is the owner of the registered SCRABBLE® trademark in the United States and Canada.

That vote is set for later this week.

The North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) seems poised to remove hundreds of offensive slurs from tournament-level Scrabble play.
That's especially true if using those words might cause offense to existing players or deter new players from joining the competitive Scrabble community. In the mid-'90s, Hasbro faced outside pressure when the Anti-Defamation League publicly took issue with a number of words that are noted as offensive in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (which itself collected words published in other major dictionaries, including those marked as offensive in those source texts). "I don't think that this is the time for us to be contributing divisively to the world's problems.". Homophobia, Its British counterpart is Collins Scrabble Words Some also argued that playing offensive words can make tournament players "look like a group of rude bigots" to casual viewers or passersby that might view the game board. The discussion over offensive words and slurs in the Scrabble association’s official word list began in the wake of global Black Lives Matter protests. “I am thinking specifically of those words which are used primarily as slurs: that is, words that are used to label someone as being of less value than the speaker based on some innate trait such as gender, race or sexual orientation – not words that are used to cause offence on scatological, prurient, profane or other grounds.