Leaders of the Scrabble tournament community in North America are voting on whether to ban the use of racial and homophobic slurs.
The vote will decide whether the words will be removed from the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) list of accepted words, according to the BBC.
The NASPA manages competitive Scrabble tournaments and clubs in North America.
Hasbro, owner of the rights to Scrabble in North America, says that NASPA has ‘agreed to remove all slurs from their word list for Scrabble tournament play, which is managed solely by NASPA and available only to members’.
Hasbro has not allowed slurs in its dictionary since 1994. However the association has still permitted them.
The association licenses its list of words to software developers.
NASPA chief executive John Chew told the BBC: ‘The vote is at this point a necessary formality, and we will be removing all offensive words from our lexicon. We will be reviewing our candidate list of 236 such words carefully to make sure that they all need to be deleted, which may take an additional week or two after the decision.
‘I don’t think that this is the time for us to be contributing divisively to the world’s problems.’
He was worried people were put off from joining the association due to offensive language in the association’s dictionary.
NASPA’s survey asked whether respondents wanted the ‘N-word’ removed from the association’s vocabulary. Mr Chew said members were split over removing the ‘N-word’, while the public was in favour.
‘Of course, there will inevitably be a situation if slurs are banned where a world championship final hinges on one player’s inability to play a now-banned word. That’s bound to happen,’ he said.
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