The word yowza appears in the new edition of Merriam Webster's "Official Scrabble Players Dictionary," in New York, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. It is among more than 300 additions in the latest edition.... (Associated Press) 
 
 The word yowza appears in the new edition of Merriam Webster's "Official Scrabble Players Dictionary," in New York, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. It is among more than 300 additions in the latest edition. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — Scrabble players, time to rethink your game because 300 new words are coming your way, including some long-awaited gems: OK and ew, to name a few. 
 
 Merriam-Webster released the sixth edition of "The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary" on Monday, four years after the last freshening up. The company, at the behest of Scrabble owner Hasbro Inc., left out one possibility under consideration for a hot minute — RBI — after consulting competitive players who thought it potentially too contentious. There was a remote case to be made since RBI has morphed into an actual word, pronounced rib-ee. 
 
 But that's OK because, "OK." 
 
 "OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time," said lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster. "Basically two- and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game." 
 
 There's more good news in qapik, adding to an arsenal of 20 playable words beginning with q that don't need a u. Not that Scrabblers care all that much about definitions, qapik is a unit of currency in Azerbaijan. 
 
 "Every time there's a word with q and no u, it's a big deal," Sokolowski said. "Most of these are obscure." 
 
 There are some sweet scorers now eligible for play, including bizjet, and some magical vowel dumps, such as arancini, those Italian balls of cooked rice. Bizjet, meaning — yes — a small plane used for business, would be worth a whopping 120 points on an opening play, but only if it's made into a plural with an s. That's due to the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles and the double word bonus space usually played at the start. 
 
 The Springfield, Massachusetts-based dictionary company sought counsel from the North American Scrabble Players Association when updating the book, Sokolowski said, "to make sure that they agree these words are desirable." 
 
 Sokolowski has a favorite among the new words but not, primarily, because of Scrabble scores. "It's macaron," he said, referring to the delicate French sandwich cookie featuring different flavors and fillings. 
 
 "I just like what it means," he said. 
 
 Merriam-Webster put out the first official Scrabble dictionary in 1976. Before that, the game's rules called for any desk dictionary to be consulted. Since an official dictionary was created, it has been updated every four to eight years, Sokolowski said. 
 
 There are other new entries Sokolowski likes, from a wordsmith's view. 
 
 "I think ew is interesting because it expresses something new about what we're seeing in language, which is to say that we are now incorporating more of what you might call transcribed speech. Sounds like ew or mm-hmm, or other things like coulda or kinda. Traditionally, they were not in the dictionary but because so much of our communication is texting and social media that is written language, we are finding more transcribed speech and getting a new group of spellings for the dictionary," he said. 
 
 Like ew, there's another interjection now in play, yowza, along with a word some might have thought was already allowed: zen. 
 
 There's often chatter around Scrabble boards over which foreign words have been accepted into English to the degree they're playable. Say hello to schneid, another of the new kids, this one with German roots. It's a sports term for a losing streak. Other foreigners added because they predominantly no longer require linguistic white gloves, such as italics or quotation marks: bibimbap, cotija and sriracha. 
 
 Scrabble was first trademarked as such in 1948, after it was thought up under a different name in 1933 by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect in Poughkeepsie, New York. Interest in the game picked up in the early 1950s, according to legend, when the president of Macy's happened upon it while on vacation. 
 
 Now, the official dictionary holds more than 100,000 words. Other newcomers Sokolowski shared are aquafaba, beatdown, zomboid, twerk, sheeple, wayback, bokeh, botnet, emoji, facepalm, frowny, hivemind, puggle and nubber. ||||| NEW YORK (AP) — Merriam-Webster has picked a small but powerful suffix as word of the year: ism. 
 
 The suffix "ism" is photographed in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, in New York, Monday, Dec. 14, 2015. Merriam-Webster has picked a small but powerful suffix as word of the year: ism. The top... (Associated Press) 
 
 The suffix "ism" is photographed in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, in New York, Monday, Dec. 14, 2015. Merriam-Webster has picked a small but powerful suffix as word of the year: ism. The top... (Associated Press) 
 
 But not just any ism. The top isms to earn high traffic spikes and big bumps in lookups on the dictionary company's website in 2015 over the year before are socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism. 
 
 "We had a lot on our minds this year," mused Peter Sokolowski, the Springfield, Massachusetts-based company's editor at large, in a recent interview. "It's a serious year. These are words of ideas and practices. We're educating ourselves." 
 
 Pinpointing reasons why words go on the run at Merriam-Webster is an educated guess. The dictionary company tracks corresponding news events to link lookups to real life. And its researchers also crunch data in a way that filters out common words frequently looked up year after year after year when making their top annual choices. 
 
 Lookups for fascism corresponded to release of video in November showing a white police officer shooting a black teenager in Chicago, and the criminal charges that followed. Merriam-Webster also saw a stronger correlation in heavy traffic on its site for that word and "fascist" and flash points in Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign, including reports on his anti-Islam rhetoric. 
 
 The isms often collide, driving each other in popularity, Sokolowski said. 
 
 "Fascism we more closely associate as the response to various acts of terrorism. After the attacks in Paris and the attacks in Colorado Springs and in San Bernardino, and because of Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslims, we then see the word fascism spike," he said. 
 
 Lookups of racism were high all year but had two noticeable spikes, one after the South Carolina church shootings and another amid the University of Missouri protests. 
 
 Sokolowski, a lexicographer by training, said one spike in lookups for feminism came in April and corresponded with reports on an Ohio middle school student who wore a T-shirt with the word printed on it in a school photo, only to have it digitally blacked out by school administrators. The school later apologized. 
 
 Reports on Caitlyn Jenner, Amy Schumer and Hillary Clinton all included discussion of feminism, as did reviews of the film "Mad Max: Fury Road" and chatter about previews of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." 
 
 In addition, Emma Watson's 2014 UN speech made the news again twice this year; first for inspiring Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai to call herself a feminist in a viral video, and again when it was revealed that Watson was asked not to use the word at all in the speech, Sokolowski noted. 
 
 The word socialism has Bernie Sanders to thank for its popularity. 
 
 "The big spikes have been associated with the fact that we have a presidential candidate who identifies as a Democratic Socialist," Sokolowski said. "We saw that even though socialism was in the Top 10 of the most looked-up words in the whole history of the site, it increased in a spike beginning in late July when Bernie Sanders had a multicity rally that was organized through social media and attracted about 100,000 people in 3,000 communities or more around the country." 
 
 In October, lookups for socialism spiked again during the first Democratic debate featuring Sanders and Clinton. 
 
 John Morse, president and publisher of Merriam-Webster, said socialism led the ism charge after a strong showing in 2012, but the company decided to go with the broader suffix instead as word of the year "because it was hard not see a bigger story staring us in the face, which was the profusion of ism words all over the most frequently looked-up list." 
 
 Other ism words on the move at Merriam-Webster.com this year were professionalism, masochism, federalism, pragmatism, existentialism, hedonism and Marxism. 
 
 Other words that sent people to the site in high numbers include marriage, hypocrite, respect, inspiration and minion. The company does not release raw numbers of lookups. 
 
 "Inspiration still kind of baffles us," Morse said. "I can't really tell you what it is in the world of 2015 that is so much different from '14 that inspiration has moved up." 
 
 The company began picking a word of the year in 2003. It went with "culture" in 2014. 
 
 This year's word of the year at Dictionary.com is identity. The folks at Oxford Dictionaries went with a pictograph, an emoji called the "Face with Tears of Joy." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Leanne Italie on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie ||||| In this Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010 photo, Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster Inc., thumbs through the index card files at the dictionary publisher, in Springfield, Mass. Merriam-Webster... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010 photo, Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster Inc., holds up reference index card files showing the word "pragmatic" at the dictionary publisher, in Springfield,... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010 photo, the word "austerity" is shown on an index card file at dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster Inc. in Springfield, Mass. Merriam-Webster has chosen "austerity" as its... (Associated Press) 
 
 The move sparked angry protests, strikes and riots across the country as unemployment skyrocketed and the crisis spread to other European nations. The move also incited a rush to online dictionaries from those searching for a definition. 
 
 Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as "the quality or state of being austere" and "enforced or extreme economy," set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday. 
 
 John Morse, president and publisher of the Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary, said "austerity" saw more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary's free online tool and came with more coverage of the debt crisis. 
 
 "What we look for ... what are the words that have had spikes that strike us very much as an anomaly for their regular behavior," Morse said. "The word that really qualifies this year for that is 'austerity'." 
 
 Runners-up also announced Monday included "pragmatic," "moratorium," "socialism," and "bigot" _ the last word resulted from public uses by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former CNN host Rick Sanchez and former NPR senior analyst Juan Williams. 
 
 Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, said this year's top 10 words were associated with a news event or coverage, which editors believe resulted in prolonged jumps in searches. 
 
 "Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint the searches on one particular news event, but typically that is what sparks people's curiosity in a word," Sokolowski said. 
 
 For example, "socialism" was searched, editors believe, because of coverage around federal bailouts and Democratic-backed federal health care legislation. And editors noticed that "pragmatic" was looked-up a number of times after midterm elections. 
 
 According to Morse, the dictionary's online website sees more than 500 million searches a year _ with most of those being usual suspects like "effect" and "affect." But he said words selected for the dictionary's top 10 were words that had searches hundreds of thousands of out-of-character hits. 
 
 Also making the top ten list was the word "doppelganger." Sokolowski said the word saw a jump in searches after George Stephanopoulos of ABC's "Good Morning America" called "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert "Julia Roberts' doppelganger." Roberts played Gilbert in the book's film adaptation and resembles the writer. 
 
 "Doppelganger" was also used in the popular television show, "The Vampire Diaries." 
 
 "Sometimes, that all it takes," Sokolowski said. 
 
 Words "shellacking," "ebullient," "dissident," and "furtive" also made this year's top list. 
 
 Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and author of "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word," said the list of words shows how the country is evolving because the public is looking up words that used to be very common. 
 
 "Around 20 to 30 years ago, everyone would know what 'socialism' was," said Metcalf, who is also executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. "Same with bigot. That fact that they have to be looked up says something about us." 
 
 That's true with some words like "shellacking," said Jenna Portier, an English instructor at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La. Although Merriam-Webster editors said searches for the word spiked after President Barack Obama said he and his party took "a shellacking" from voters in midterm election, Portier said the word is very common in southern Louisiana. "Where I'm from, it means to varnish something like wood," Portier said. 
 
 Shana Walton, a languages and literature professor also at Nicholls State University, said she understands how news events maybe influenced the dictionary's list. 
 
 "If 'moratorium' is one of the most looked-up words, that's clearly a reflection of how often the word was used in the wake of the BP oil spill," said Walton, a linguistic anthropologist who is doing research on oil and land in south Louisiana. "Many people in south Louisiana expressed much more outrage about the moratorium, frankly, than about the spill." 
 
 Metcalf said the American Dialect Society will release its "Word of the Year" winner in January, but it's selected by the group like Time's Person of the Year.
– Scrabble players, time to rethink your game because 300 new words are coming your way, including some long-awaited gems: OK and ew, to name a few. Merriam-Webster released the sixth edition of "The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary" on Monday, four years after the last freshening up. The company, at the behest of Scrabble owner Hasbro Inc., left out one possibility—RBI—after consulting competitive players who thought it potentially too contentious. There was a remote case to be made since RBI has morphed into an actual word, pronounced rib-ee. But that's OK because, "OK." "OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time," says lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster. "Basically two- and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game." There's more good news in qapik—a unit of currency in Azerbaijan— adding to an arsenal of 20 playable words beginning with q that don't need a u. "Every time there's a word with q and no u, it's a big deal," Sokolowski tells the AP. "Most of these are obscure." There are some sweet scorers now eligible for play, including bizjet—a small plane used for business and some magical vowel dumps, such as arancini, those Italian balls of cooked rice. Yowza is now in play, along with a word some might have thought was already allowed: zen. Other newcomers Sokolowski shared are aquafaba, beatdown, zomboid, twerk, sheeple, wayback, bokeh, botnet, emoji, facepalm, frowny, hivemind, puggle, and nubber.