Swearing and racial slurs on Scrabulous

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I was playing Scrabble at Scrabulous the other day and noticed that my opponent laid down a four-letter word that happens to be a racial slur.

My friend is a very PC kind of guy; I didn’t think he was trying to insult me. I figured that, since we both routinely cheat online, the “Scrabble helper” program my buddy used must not have known that the word was offensive and simply picked it for another, legitimate meaning. Curious, I clicked on the site’s in-line dictionary to see what it meant, and found that there was no legitimate meaning. So I started looking up other racial and sexual slurs. Every one I could think of was in there and allowed.

Clearly, I had too much time on my hands. So I started typing in four-letter swear words, just for the sake of science. Every one was allowed, including the seven banned by the FCC.

I should say here that I am no prude and am a free speech absolutist. Even my children talk like truck drivers. I was mainly curious because, if these words were allowed in Scrabble, I probably know more of them than most of my opponents. All these years I was ignoring them on the false assumption that they’d never stand up to a challenge. I felt like such a fool.

Being thorough-ish, I went to Hasbro’s online Scrabble dictionary, and looked up the words. Sure enough, not a one was allowed! Had Scrabulous had been hacked by a foul-mouthed, racist, sexist prankster?

Nope. Apparently, until four years ago, those words were indeed allowed. But after an uproar at a national tournament, the National Scrabble Association expunged 170 words that were deemed offensive.

I guess the Scrabulous dudes never got the memo. The Agarwallas, two brothers living in India, had put up the unauthorized site two years ago and now have more than 700,000 users. They’ve been making over $25,000 a month and are still trying to work out some kind of deal with Hasbro and Mattel, who are asserting that their companies own the licensing rights to the game. The Agarwallas, meanwhile, are reportedly holding out for more money. Maybe if they get it, they’ll be able to afford the new dictionary.

Comments

[Stewart Holden]

The NSA did no such thing. It was Hasbro who did the expunging, but the NSA argued against it and published its own Tournament and Club Word List which is identical to the commercial OSPD book but still contains the supposedly offensive words.

Fortunately over here in the UK we didn't have the debate at all and all books still contain all words, rude or otherwise.

Hope this helps,

Stewart Holden
Association of British Scrabble Players

[Mitch]

You have things a little mixed up. It was Hasbro that expunged 170 words when the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 3rd Edition was produced, because one of their board members found a jewish slur in the dictionary unacceptable.

The players in the National Scrabble Association objected to the removal, and a compromise was created where club and tournament players got their own dictionary (the OWL - for Official Words List) which kept the offensive words.

It is the club and tournament OWL that Scrabulous uses, not the expurgated OSPD, which is for home and school use. The Scrabulous dictionary is up to date (including new words like QA and ZA).

[Daveycanuck]

Scrabulous uses the current Tournament Word List (TWL) which is a more complete list than that included in the Hasbro Scrabble Dictionary. The Scrabble Dictionary (and it's online variants) are based on all words that exist in any one of 5 'official' dictionaries. The Scrabble dictionary has been through revisions to fix errors and has also had all potentially offensive works expunged to protect (ok, I don't who they are protecting but you get the idea). The Tournament Word List on the other hand has all those expunged words added back in (I guess the expectation is that Tournament Players are more hearty or are otherwise more capable of managed the immoral onslaught of the odd dirty word).