#Scrabble bans 236 bigoted words, slurs from official list

Players of the classic board game will no longer be able to rack up points for spelling out racial and ethnic slurs, according to Scrabble officials.

A total of 236 bigoted words were removed from the official Scrabble word list used at tournaments — in order to make the game friendlier to all types of people, The North American Scrabble Players Association. said Wednesday.

“Removing slurs is the very least that we can do to make our association more inclusive,” NASPA CEO John Chew said in a statement. “How can we in this day tell prospective members that they can only play with us if they accept that offensive slurs have no meaning when played on a board?”

But not all members of the 10,000-strong group, which was polled about whether to scrap the hateful words agreed — and some were angry about the change.

“Some members threatened to leave the association if a single word were removed; others threatened to leave the association if any offensive words remained. There were a lot of good and bad arguments on both sides,” Chew said in the statement.

The group didn’t say which specific words had been removed but Chew told NPR the “N word” — worth a measly eight points — was among the first to get the boot.

The toy company Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble, backed up the decision by changing the rules of the game “to make clear that slurs are not permissible.”

The firm said it has worked to eliminate offensive words from the game’s dictionary with every new edition that’s released.