Wellington Jighere, 32, made history on Sunday after he was crowned as the first African world champion in Scrabble at a weekend-long English-language championship in Perth, Australia, reported the Guardian.

He beat his opponent, Englishman Lewis MacKay, with four straight wins in an epic best-of-seven finale.

Jighere, who was sponsored by the Nigerian government, romped to victory using words including “dacoit”, meaning a member of a class of robbers in India and Burma; “yow”, Australian slang for keeping a look-out, and “katti”, an alternative spelling for a weight used in China.

The champ also received a congratulatory phone call from none other than the Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, President Muhammadu Buhari.

Jighere is not new to the upper echelons of world Scrabble, having paid his dues over the past decade. In 2008 he won the Africa Scrabble Championship, held in Nairobi, Kenya, and defended his title in 2010 in Accra, Ghana. He was 11th in the 2009 Worlds, being as high as 4th at one point but losing a few close games, and also won the prestigious Godswill Akpabio International Scrabble Classics that year.

Then, in late 2010, he retired due to “disagreements” with the way things were being run in the Nigeria Scrabble Federation. He decided to focus on his studies in crop studies and performed his NYSC (National Youth Service Corps).

He returned with a vengeance in 2013 and triumphed in the 2015 WSC, playing 4 nearly-flawless games.

Thanks all, for the prayers and the support. Just like our Oga, Sammy Okosagah, alluded to earlier on, it was a battle...
Posted by Wellington Jighere on Sunday, November 8, 2015

Joghere returns home to Nigeria with a $10,000 (£6,600) prize and a potent tool in his job-seeking armoury.

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Scrabble, a 76-year-old game, just caught up to the digital age. Hip slang terms like hashtag, selfie, bromance, and chillax are among 5,000 new words that have been added to the fifth edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, which was published August 2014.

The dictionary, which is produced by Merriam-Webster and contains more than 100,000 playable words, hadn’t been updated since 2005, so even terms that have been in the cultural lexicon for a while—emo, bling, frenemy, mixtape, beatbox, and texter, for example—are new to the book.

Plus, serious Scrabble players will be happy to see that many of the new words have high-scoring potential, like buzzkill (worth 32 points), yuzu (worth 16 points), and quinzhee, a word for a shelter made of snow (worth 29 points, or up to 401 points if played in the corner of the game board).

A few handy two-letter words were also added, like po (meaning a chamber pot), da (meaning dad), and te (an alternate spelling of ti, one of the notes of a musical scale), as well as geocache, which fans voted into the dictionary in May.

In order to make it into the Scrabble bible, a word has to already be in a standard dictionary, run between two and eight letters long, “can’t require capitalization, can’t have hyphens or apostrophes, and can’t be an abbreviation,” according to the Associated Press.

Check out a few more of the new Scrabble words, courtesy of Time.com:

BEATBOX [v. -ED, -ING, -ES] to sing to the rhythm of rap music

BROMANCE [n. pl. -S] a close nonsexual relationship between men

BUZZKILL [n. pl. -S] one that has a depressing or negative effect

CHILLAX [v. -ED, -ING] -ES to calm down

COQUI [n. pl. -S] a small arboreal frog

DA [n. pl. -S] dad

DUBSTEP [n. pl. -S] a type of electronic dance music

FRENEMY [n. pl. -MIES)]

FUNPLEX [n. pl. -ES] a building with facilities for sports and games

GEOCACHE [n. pl. –CACHED, -CACHING, -CACHES] to search for hidden items by using a Global Positioning System device as part of a game

GI [n. pl. -S] a white garment worn in martial arts

HASHTAG [n. pl. -S] a word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that categorizes the accompanying text

JOCKDOM [n. pl. -S] the world of athletes

JOYPAD [n. pl. -S] a device with buttons to control computer images

MIXTAPE [n. pl. -S] a compilation of songs recorded from various sources

MOJITO [n. pl. -TOS] a cocktail made of rum, sugar, mint, and lime juice

PO [n. pl. POS] a chamber pot

PONZU [n. pl. -S] a tangy sauce used chiefly on seafood

...and more below:

QAJAQ (n. pl. -S) kayak

QIGONG (n. pl. -S) a Chinese system of physical exercises

SCHMUTZ (n. pl. -ES) dirt, grime

SELFIE (n. pl. -S) an image of oneself taken by oneself using a phone camera

SOJU (n. pl. -S) Korean vodka distilled from rice or sweet potato

SUDOKU (n. pl. -S) a puzzle involving the numbers 1 through 9

TE (n. pl. -S) ti

TEXTER (n. pl. -S) one that texts

VLOG (v. VLOGGED, VLOGGING, VLOGS) to blog video material

VODCAST (v. -CAST or -CASTED, -CASTING, -CASTS) to make video files available for download over the Internet

WEBZINE (n. pl. -S) a magazine published on the Internet

YUZU (n. pl. -S) a sour Japanese citrus fruit

Credit: Community Table

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