Since Scrabble adopted an official lexicon in 1978, one thing has been constant: People have never stopped arguing about what is or isn't a word. Players have defended the game by noting that its letter strings--from AA (a kind of Hawaiian lava) to ZZZ (an interjection for sleep)--could be found in a bunch of standard North American dictionaries, books that have been used through the years to compile and revise Scrabble's tournament word list. But after an update last month introduced dozens of suspect words, riling up the community of competitive players, that's becoming harder to do. The linguistic tumult began in September, when the organization that maintains the word list used in club and tournament Scrabble, NASPA Games, published a draft of its update. The NASPA list includes all of the words in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, the go-to source for living-room and app players in North America, plus a lot more.

In the mid-1970s, top players in an emerging tournament Scrabble scene persuaded the game's corporate owner to adopt a universal lexicon for competition. Players manually scraped five standard college dictionaries, recording every unique two- through eight-letter word (plus inflections) that met the game's rules. When the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was published, in 1978, players rejoiced. "You can retire the boxing gloves and put up your swords," the Scrabble Players Newspaper wrote. "You now have an arbiter to settle all arguments."