Hasbro is rewriting Scrabble rules to ban "slurs"

It’s been a busy few months for the North American Scrabble Players Association, the nonprofit that Hasbro has granted the right to use the word Scrabble and to oversee the game’s official word list.

Here’s what we learned from Slate: In May, NASPA announced that its official dictionary would now be included in another company’s Scrabble app, giving players there the ability to use certain colorful words and phrases that weren’t previously in the app.

But just this month, NASPA announced that its executive leadership wanted to remove many of those words from all Scrabble lists.

And Hasbro made that desire official this week, with the announcement that NASPA would remove those words and that Hasbro would rewrite the Scrabble rules to forbid the use of “slurs.”

This is not, as you might imagine, a universally supported decision, and opposition comes from a variety of angles.

Check out some of the reactions in Slate.

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