It’s a sign of increasing adoption, if ever there was one. Bitcoin has now officially been listed as a word within the Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary, curated by those perennial guardians of the English language at Merriam Webster.
The development means that the world’s leading cryptocurrency now joins three hundred new entries to the official Scrabble dictionary, including suspiciously millennial-sounding terms such as ’emoji’, ‘ew’ and ‘facepalm’ – with the total number of words on the list sitting in excess of 100,00.
The word ‘bitcoin’ itself will fetch you a minimum of 11 points on the Scrabble board, climbing to a potential theoretical maximum of 116 if you can manage to coincide the tiles with a double-word score, triple-word score and a 50-points bonus for rack clearance all at once.
“What the hell Scrabble??? That’s a proper noun!” stated one angry, confused and very disappointed commentator on the Cryptocurrency subreddit.
Whilst Bitcoin may now feature in the new Merriam Webster dictionary, other common cryptocurrency words remain in Scrabble limbo, including ‘cryptocurrency’ itself, ‘blockchain’ and ‘HODL’.
