The people have spoken: Scrabble fans have voted to add “geocache” to the players dictionary — the first new addition in nine years.
Hasbro revealed the word, “a verb meaning to seek items by means of a GPS device as part of a game,” on ABC’s Good Morning America today. “Geocache” beat out other finalists “zen” , “ew”, and “booyah” as part of a call for nominations on the Hasbro Game Night Facebook page.
“We’ve been watching geocache for some time,” Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large at Merriam-Webster, said in a statement.
According to a 2010 New York Times article, this high-tech treasure hunt has been popular “only since May 2000, when President Bill Clinton announced that intentional degrading of signals received by civilians end, making their GPS devices more accurate.” It has become a family pastime, a budget-friendly hobby among parents and their children because they only need their smartphones to play. They find coordinates on websites like geocaching.com and head out to suburban malls and amusement parks together to find a “cache” or trinket hidden somewhere.
In fact, some might say it will be easier to find “caches” than to find a place to put down “geocache” on the Scrabble board because it’s an eight-letter word. On the Hasbro Game Night Facebook page, players are complaining in the comments section, arguing “Most bingos are 7-letter words that are connected to other words with an S or by a two-letter joiner (such as EW)” and “When will we ever need to use that one- always try to use ZEN and EW- many more opportunities for that to happen.”
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