If you find yourself hiding out from a harsh snowstorm in Athabaskan Canada, and set out a Scrabble board to pass the time, look around you for inspiration. Sitting inside a quinzhee, a hollowed-out pile of snow used a shelter, could nab you 29 points.

It is one of the new 6,500 officially added to the new Scrabble dictionary. An obscure word no doubt, but it joins the ranks of popular words used in text speech and online, like obvs, lotsa, lolz, and shizzle. Think it’s ridic? Well, you can play that word too.

There’s also an entire lexicon of terms and neologisms relating to technology, including FaceTime, hashtag, sexting, and hacktivist.

Helen Newstead, the head of language content at Collins Dictionary, told the BBC came to the decision to add so many new words to the Scrabble ranks.

“Dictionaries have always included formal and informal English, but it used to be hard to find printed evidence of the use of slang words,” she said. “Now people use slang in social media posts, tweets, blogs, comments, text messages – you name it – so there’s a host of evidence for informal varieties of English that simply didn’t exist before.”

On this evening's The Right Hook, guest host Jonathan Healy will talk about the shifting dynamics of Scrabble spelling with Feargal Murphy, a lecturer in linguistics in UCD. Tune in live at 6.15pm, or listen back to the show's podcast here.