The joy of small words

The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary By: Merriam-Webster Publisher: Merriam-Webster Mass Market Year published: 2014 Price: $8.5 Pages: 704

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Scrabble players rejoice: 5,000 new words are on the way. Associated Press reports in New York.

To Scrabble fanatics, big gifts sometimes come in small packages.

The word "te" as a variant of "ti", the seventh tone on the musical scale, is a hardworking little gem among 5,000 words added to The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, out on Aug 11 from Merriam-Webster.

The dictionary's last freshening up was a decade ago. Entries in the forthcoming book include texter, vlog, bromance, hashtag, dubstep and selfie - terms that have bloomed quickly into common usage.

But it's the addition of te and three other two-letter words - da, gi and po - that has Robin Pollock Daniel excited. Daniel, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, is a champion of the North American Scrabble Players Association, which has a committee that helps Merriam-Webster track down new, playable words of two to eight letters.

"Being able to hook an 'e' underneath 't' means that I can play far more words," explains Daniel, who practices Scrabble two to four hours a day. "Sometimes you play parallel to a word and you're making two-letter words along the way. I call those the amino acids of Scrabble. The more two-letter words we have, the more possibilities a word will fit."

One woman's te is another man's "qajaq", one of Peter Sokolowski's favorites among the new words. He's a lexicographer and editor at large for the Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster.