Image by Wikimedia

Wikimedia

(JTA) — Next time you’re playing Scrabble, you can put down “schmutz,” “schtum” or even “tuchus” without fear of being challenged. (“Tuchuses,” the plural, is also acceptable.)

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

These are just some of the new Yiddish words to be added to Merriam-Webster’s “Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary.”

The dictionary’s fifth edition, published this month, includes more than 5,000 new words in total, many of them recently coined ones like “beatbox,” “hashtag” and “chillax.”

But “schmutz” is one of the few newcomers to be highlighted in a promotional video on Merriam-Webster’s YouTube channel. In it, Jewish comedian Judy Gold, laying on a thick Long Island accent, shares several examples of how the word — which means dirt — might appear in a sentence.

The new additions are hardly the only playable Yiddish and Hebrew words. Even players still relying on the fourth edition, published in 2005, will find each letter in the Hebrew aleph bet (transliterated into English, of course) — except, oddly, for the word “alephbet” itself.

Meanwhile, various spellings of shadchan (matchmaker), mitzvah (commandment), aliyah (immigration to Israel) and tallis (prayer shawl) are accepted. And virtually every word you can think of that starts with a “sh” — shlub, shlep, even shmuck — is not only accepted, but can be spelled with or without a “c” in between.

One Jew-y word you cannot play however, at least not if you’re using the “Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary” as your arbiter (ironically, official Scrabble tournaments use a separate dictionary): “jew.” Capitalized it’s a proper noun — off limits — and while some people use it lower-case as a verb meaning “to bargain,” the lower case form is excluded from the dictionary on the grounds of anti-Semitism.

Which is good for the Jews, but bad if you’re trying to get rid of a J.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$90 $180

$360

Other amount