Proper nouns come into play in Scrabble rule change

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8604625.stm

The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count.

Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

Until now a few proper nouns had been allowed which were determined by a word list based on the Collins dictionary.

What am I going to do when some rap fan wants to use the name 50 Cent on a Scrabble board...and uses the blanks for 5 and 0????

doesn't crush me, but I know I am going to forget to use it.

:eyes:

all those words that end in SK or CK are a godsend. Of course there are a few LK words too.

Both at the beginning and ending of words.

This rule change won't matter to me: no one will play me. No one in thirty years has played me twice.

I once scored 430 or thereabouts. Once I got my hands on the official dictionary and learned all the two and three letter words, nobody would play me.

txtspk is allowed?

I think those of us at casa cloudbase will ignore the new rules.

When will Twitterspeak be included?

Time to break out the map of the former Yugoslavia.

Brcko. :D

This totally ruins the game, the banning of most proper nouns makes the size of one's vocabulary important.

:D

In the Polish language set they give you exactly one Z. That would be fine if the set wasn't intended for people who speak Polish--the language that uses more Z's than any other in the world. How in FUCK can you play a game that requires you to spell out words in Polish if the one letter you need to spell them out isn't there? This is like putting one E in the English set.

I had a Polish Scrabble set a couple of Polish linguists made for me, so I could provide language maintenance to my Polish linguists. They wrote to everyone they knew telling them, if you have a Scrabble set you don't want for some reason, could you send me the letter tiles? They got forty sets, all with the Z. They wound up with a set with 139 letters: the standard 100 letters you always get, plus 39 more Zs.