“There are no hard and fast rules,” Singh told me-and when it comes to abbreviations, “Where do you stop?”įor now, there’s just a limited number of abbreviations included in the Social Dictionary, but Singh kept the door open to adding more. So how did BFF, FOMO, and TFW make the cut among the 50,000 new words? When the Social Dictionary was being created, there was no attempt to include all abbreviations. You now can play bae but not baes, bestie but not besties. Interestingly, though, the Words With Friends suggestion form warns that they’re unable to add words from the traditional no-go categories: proper nouns, words with hyphens or apostrophes … and abbreviations. Every day, Zynga fields more than 5,000 suggestions for new words to make playable, and many of these have gone into the dictionary expansion. While Words With Friends has enough differences from Scrabble, such as the distribution of letters and point values, to keep them from being sued by Hasbro and Mattel, the “no abbreviation” rule has been one point of agreement shared by the two games-until now.Īccording to Gurpreet Singh, the product director of Words With Friends, the new Social Dictionary is one way that the game is responding to player feedback. The 174,000 words on the ENABLE list have served Words With Friends well over its eight-year history, ever since its first development by Newtoy (which was bought out by Zynga in 2010). and Canada, and Mattel elsewhere), became a popular word list for game-makers developing their own Scrabble spinoffs, including, in 2009, a little game called Words With Friends.
#Word to playwords with frienda free#
ENABLE, free from the proprietary burdens imposed by Scrabble’s trademark holders (Hasbro in the U.S. And when an open-source alternative to the Scrabble dictionary called ENABLE (an acronym for Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon) was released in 1997, it too considered abbreviations verboten. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, first published in 1978, has followed those instructions to the letter. As Stefan Fatsis, the author of the book Word Freak about the competitive Scrabble world, has noted, when the game was first marketed in 1948, the rules were spelled out right inside the box: “Any words found in a standard dictionary are permitted except those capitalized, those designated as foreign words, abbreviations, and words requiring apostrophes or hyphens.” Doesn’t including these abbreviations go against the spirit of games like Words With Friends that have Scrabble burned into their DNA? (And no, Zynga isn’t making DNA playable, at least not yet.)Īs the granddaddy of word-tile board games, Scrabble has long made clear what does and doesn’t count as a playable word. While trendy initialisms might make for good marketing material, purists raised on Scrabble might balk at the additions. It shows you the highest scoring move that was available to you.6 Months Inside One of America’s Most Dangerous Industries Michael Holtz Hindsight is the only 'Power up' that is to be used after you have already taken your turn. If you swap any tiles out this will deactivate the Word Radar and activating it again will deduct from your available amount. You can turn the highlighted areas off and on by clicking the 'Word Radar' icon again, without it deducting from your available quantity. Word Radar highlights all the places it is possible for you to play a word using your current tile set. You can only use 1 Swap+ per turn, so it might be wise to check the 'Tile Bag' to see what's left before swapping your tiles.
Swap+ allows you to swap any number of your available tiles - for a random selection of new ones from whichever tiles are left in the 'Tile Bag' - without sacrificing a turn. The 4 types of 'Powerups' are as follows: Powerups can also be earned from Mystery Boxes. Words With Friends has 4 different 'Powerups' that can be played during a match (3 to be used before you make your move, 1 only applicable after you've taken your turn) that you can purchase from the in-game 'Store' with 'Coins' (the in-game currency) - 'Coins' can be purchased with real money (In-App Purchases), or earned through Mystery Boxes as noted above.
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