The men and women who make up Scrabble’s most dedicated following are rarely short for words. Now they are using their expansive vocabulary to express anger after the game’s owner banned them from playing racial slurs.
Mattel, which owns the rights to the game outside North America, has been accused of pandering to censorious westerners by removing from official lists 400 derogatory terms that it believes have no place in a family game.
Mattel has refused to publish the list but the official word checker shows that the banned terms include epithets against black, Pakistani and Irish people.
The ruling, which follows a similar move by the American rights owner Hasbro, affects competition-level Scrabble, which is played by thousands of people at international tournaments.
The move has split the community as players rebel. Three prominent members of the World English-Language Scrabble Players Association (Wespa) quit in protest because they felt that playing a word was not insulting in itself.
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Darryl Francis, a British author who has helped to oversee official Scrabble word lists since the 1980s, resigned because he said that Mattel had forced the changes upon players.
“Words listed in dictionaries and Scrabble lists are not slurs,” Francis wrote. “They only become slurs when used with a derogatory purpose or intent, or used with a particular tone and in a particular context. Words in our familiar Scrabble word lists should not be removed because of a PR purpose disguised as promoting some kind of social betterment.”
Karen Richards, a Wespa committee member who helped to run the World Youth Scrabble Championship for 15 years, scoffed at Mattel’s explanation that it was a family-friendly move, pointing out that children could still play other offensive words.
Mattel said that its intervention, which is the first time it has sought to remove words, was political. Ray Adler, the global head of games, said that it was a direct result of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer.
“We looked at some of the social unrest that’s going on globally,” Adler said. “We looked at everything we were doing as a company and opportunities to be more culturally relevant. I’ve heard the argument that these are just words, but we believe they have meaning.”
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Adler acknowledged that Scrabble had long-term declining sales and that a rebrand was necessary. “To get to the next generation of Scrabble fans we need to modernise it,” he said. Can you imagine any other game where you can score points and win by using a racial epithet? It’s long overdue.”
Wespa voted in February on whether to keep the words even if this would mean severing links with Mattel and having to remove Scrabble from its name. The motion, which required a three-quarters majority, failed to carry but showed a deep split, with 156 votes to abandon Mattel and 172 to remain.
David Webb, a Scrabble grandmaster, said that the British association felt obliged to remain because “Mattel basically pointed a gun at our head”.
“They said: ‘Accept expurgations or we will withdraw the licence and stop you from using the name Scrabble’,” Webb said.
None of the Scrabble associations from Africa voted to lose the words. Webb said that a decision to ban ethnic slurs had been imposed by middle-class white people.
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“Mattel are not responding to any demands or conflicts from within the Scrabble world, which is international, inclusive and friendly. Therefore its actions are seen by many as virtue signalling, making a token gesture or ‘woke’. Imposing American values on the world is pretty obnoxious, and forcing its licensees like Wespa to agree to expurgation or lose their licence is bullying.”
Other banned words include terms used by ethnic minorities for white people. The Jewish words goy and shiksa, which denote non-Jewish people, have also been purged.
Words that survived include chav, an “insulting word for a young working-class person who wears casual sports clothes”, slut, milf and wrinklie.