Increasingly more scrabble players are irked, finding that the “Scrabble” game in Facebook includes foreign words and obsolete terms. Words like “et” and “smoyle” should not be included, according to some experts. “Et” is the nonstandard past tense for eat, while “smoyle” is the archaic form of “smile” and is not present in the American Heritage Dictionary, Dictionary.com, or in Merriam-Webster.com (www.m-w.com).

Some diehard Scrabble players who use Collins dictionary have already formed Facebook groups campaigning to have these words removed from the online word game version.

In contrast, Britons, Allan Simmons and Darryl Francis, who control word lists for Scrabble outside the U.S., are in favor of widening the range of words in the game with the exception for archaic or obsolete words.

Hopefully, the developers would come up with a satisfactory solution.

On a personal note, foreign and archaic words would not hurt the present vocabulary. In a way, it is beneficial, because this opens old and foreign literature to more readers.

The People behind Scrabulous

Scrabulous was developed by RJ Softwares, owned by Calcutta-based Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. It was launched on Facebook in 2007. However, in 2008, Facebook removed the application due to copyright infringement lawsuits. The Scrabulous website had been shut down, as well, on 25 September 2008. A day after that, RJ softwares was allowed by the Delhi High Court to post their online word game without using the name Scrabulous, Scrabble, or any name that has a similar sound. So, Scrabulous.com was replaced by GoDaddy.com.

On 20 December 2008, Hasbro (a U.S. based multinational toy company who acquired Scrabble) withdrew the lawsuit against RJ Softwares, and on 1 January 2009 Scrabulous was re-launched on Facebook as Lexulous.