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Censorship at World Scrabble Championships

The 2001 World Scrabble Championships took place December 13-17 in Las Vegas. 88 players from 40 countries competed in the prestigious biannual event, and Scrabble junkies around the world could follow the proceedings at the National Scrabble Association's website. Among the offerings at the NSA site are play-by-play transcriptions of select games from each round.

But unbeknownst to most viewers, some official NSA game transcriptions have been subtly altered to remove offensive words that had been played on the board. Some members of a Scrabble discussion mailing list noticed one such alteration, which led to mild protests of the censorship. The NSA webmaster responded on the list, stating that the alterations were "deliberate, and part of policy since the inception of the NSA web site."

This alteration took place in a sixth round game between Andrew Perry (England) and Kendall Boyd (New Zealand). (Note: world championship games use the comprehensive international Scrabble dictionary, known by the acronym "sowpods," which contains many words which don't appear in the standard North American Scrabble dictionary. And these are world-class players, so expect to see some very obscure words.) Midway through the game, Boyd held the tiles RUCKFAN on his rack. Boyd proceeded to play the word FUCK through an open U near the upper-left corner of the board. However, the following page intentionally mistranscribes the play as HUCK rather than FUCK. If you look carefully, it's easy to see the alteration, since Boyd didn't have an H to play (in fact, both H tiles are on Perry's rack), and on the following board, his F is gone. At the end of the game, the censored board contains three H tiles and only one F tile rather than the normal two apiece.

The NSA censorship policy harkens back to a controversy over offensive words in the Scrabble dictionary. Stefan Fetsis chronicles this controversy in his book Word Freak. Several years ago, a group successfully petitioned Hasbro to remove offensive words — mostly swear words and racial, ethnic or religious epithets — from the official Scrabble dictionary. However, club and tournament players protested the politically correct excisions. Eventually a compromise was reached, resulting in the creation of two dictionaries: the abridged "recreational and school play" dictionary sold in stores, and the unabridged dictionary used in club and tournament Scrabble games. Thus words like WOP, FUCK and LEZ are legal plays in tournament Scrabble, but they don't appear in the standard green-paperback Scrabble dictionary.

Evan Daze   (Dec 17, 2001)