If I remember correctly, the original version of wordle used a word list that was run past the creator's wife, who had learned English later in life. The result was a really accessible game - none of the words felt like ones you wouldn't know. It probably makes sense to reuse words than risk losing that accessibility.
(I kept a copy of original wordle, and it seems to have 2,315 words that are possible answers.)
Yes, that's correct! Took her about a year off and on, he had made a little app for her to go through and categorize everything.
As an aside, for about $200, you can ask a true/false question of every word in the English language with a frontier LLM, and get mostly good answers. I make word games in my free time and was sort of shocked when I realized how cheap intelligence has been getting.
It’s this. There are many five letter words that are not “wordley”. Words such as, idk, bokeh, are technically part of the lexicon but would never appear as a solution. The wordle bot will even tell you this if you guess them — “good guess, but unlikely to appear as a solution”. The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.
Language or the way we use it is often used to exclude "undesired", so there is a point in using them. Not a very nice point, but a point nevertheless.
1. Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed".
2. Only a tiny group of people care to "card count" Wordle to rule out words that have already been played because they think that sort of min/maxing is fun. Most people don't even think about that, so whether Wordle reuses words every few years is trivial to them.
I will say that having used the same starter word the whole time that has not come up yet, it's a little disappointing that it may now take even longer to appear.
> Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed"
The Times sure doesn't think that about the people who do Letter Boxed. One LB had "polymethylmethacrylate" in its dictionary.
I've saved the daily dictionaries from 2024-03-30 and that's the longest word out of the 93 393 total distinct words in the 674 dictionaries I've saved. They average 1199.47 words per dictionary.
They have some truly ridiculous words, such as "troughgeng". WTF is a troughgeng? Googling that gives a couple of pages in Chinese (or a similar looking language) and a Scottish dictionary entry for "Throu" which in one of the examples of "throu" as an adverb lists a bunch of phrases is it used in, including:
> (8) througang, throw-, throoging, trough-geng, -geong (Sh., Ork.), (i) a going over or through; a passage (I.Sc. 1972); specif. (ii) a narration, a recital (of a story); (iii) a full rotation of crops, a shift; (iv) a thoroughfare, lane, passageway, corridor open at either end (Sc. 1808 Jam.; Sh. 1908 Jak. (1928); Rxb. 1923 Watson W.-B.; Ork., w.Lth., wm.Sc. 1972). Also attrib.; (v) = (5); (vi) energy, drive (Bnff. 1866 Gregor D. Bnff. 192);
"Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this. And the "wordle community" is a drop in the bucket of regular players, and not remotely representative.
I did have a similar reaction personally to the "exciting news" framing but I'm not actually sure it's wrong. The original list of words was an excellent list, and it's been over 4 years.
It seems about right. They reshuffled the deck about three-quarters of the way through (1689 ÷ 2315 = 72.9%). Blackjack shoes are typically shuffled around the same point. Different games, but similar considerations in this respect.
For my game redactle.net, I blacklist the Wikipedia article for 2 years. I figure there is a tradeoff between novelty and allowing the pool of articles to shrink. The Wikipedia vital level 4 category has 10k articles and probably half of them actually meet the criteria (length, number of languages etc) for making the cut.
I've used my own tool (https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/wordle-solver/) for understanding how many words are left after each guess. It'll show hints if you want them too, but they are disabled by default. I like understanding how my guesses reduce the word space well (or not).
It uses the list of all of the words that can be in Wordle, and there are so many words I can't imagine anyone guessing. And I come from a family with large vocabularies.
My friend and I labored over the word lists for our word game subletters.fun. We wanted the word pairs and at least one optimal path for each word pair to be from words on one list, which were simpler words that we would expect everyone to be familiar with. But players could use their own more advanced vocabulary to solve the puzzles on their own without feeling restricted. Then we bundled literally 10 years of unique word pairs into the game and shipped it.
The analysis misses a point. Wordle uses two lists of five letter words: words that are in the dictionary, and can be used in a guess; and those that can be used as the daily secret word. The latter list is smaller, and sticks to more common words. Wordle has been around for 1550 days, so they have used 67% of the possible words. In another couple of years, they have to either start using uncommon words, or recycle. There's no rush, so it's unclear why this is happening now.
I am guessing a high percentage of wordle players prefer a wordle version which uses common words, and New York Times would prefer cater to those, rather than a smaller group of enthusiasts.
Not only are they using regional specific knowledge, but they use regional relative concepts.
Many people do not agree that ant rhymes with aunt.
The recent Homophones of words meaning brutal.
Gorey, Grimm, Grizzly, Scarry.
I am guessin that Grimm is a eponym which makes it nebulous at best, eponyms take a lot of use to be regarded in objective terms rather than as invoking an arbartrary property of the name holder. Kafkaesque rises to that use. I don't think Grimm does.
I have no idea if Scarry is supposed to be a homonym for scary. Which it neither sounds like nor means brutal.
Perhaps there is another word that means brutal that sounds like however the person who makes connections thinks Scarry is pronounced.
In which case it would be a homonym of a synonym of brutal.
I also do not live in the same country as only connect, yet do not have such issues with their walls.
The real problem is that while you might be wrong about an answer, once you lose faith that the puzzle setter is right, you can never be sure if your guess is wrong or they are wrong. It is no longer a puzzle and you are playing 'what have I got in my pocket?'.
Every now and then I play quordle, octordle, and once a thousand-word variation (which breaks down gameplaywise to just getting every letter at every spot).
A bit of reuse of the same word in the one-word version can't hurt I think
It doesn't beg the question, it raises it. Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which you assume the truth of your conclusion. It doesn't mean something "begs for the question to be asked."
I have no idea why this incorrect use of the term drives me so nuts; however, you'd think a blog post about English words and Wordle wouldn't make this mistake.
I think the idea was NYT was trying to imply they were running out.
To me, "begging the question" doesn't mean assuming the conclusion in particular, it just means that some of the premises used are less obvious than they are being passed off as. Assuming the conclusion is merely an especially egregious form of that.
If I remember correctly, the original version of wordle used a word list that was run past the creator's wife, who had learned English later in life. The result was a really accessible game - none of the words felt like ones you wouldn't know. It probably makes sense to reuse words than risk losing that accessibility.
(I kept a copy of original wordle, and it seems to have 2,315 words that are possible answers.)
Yes, that's correct! Took her about a year off and on, he had made a little app for her to go through and categorize everything.
As an aside, for about $200, you can ask a true/false question of every word in the English language with a frontier LLM, and get mostly good answers. I make word games in my free time and was sort of shocked when I realized how cheap intelligence has been getting.
It’s this. There are many five letter words that are not “wordley”. Words such as, idk, bokeh, are technically part of the lexicon but would never appear as a solution. The wordle bot will even tell you this if you guess them — “good guess, but unlikely to appear as a solution”. The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.
> The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.
Not my experience at all.
Ask me how I know what an EPEE is
> EPEE
They love that one.
Yes there’s no point using technically correct words if hardly anyone know them.
Sure there is, as long as your audience does.
Language or the way we use it is often used to exclude "undesired", so there is a point in using them. Not a very nice point, but a point nevertheless.
This may well be why the game became such a hit among everyone.
1. Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed".
2. Only a tiny group of people care to "card count" Wordle to rule out words that have already been played because they think that sort of min/maxing is fun. Most people don't even think about that, so whether Wordle reuses words every few years is trivial to them.
The Wordle list is available here (in addition to many other places): https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-web-tools/blob/main/wordl...
I will say that having used the same starter word the whole time that has not come up yet, it's a little disappointing that it may now take even longer to appear.
> Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed"
The Times sure doesn't think that about the people who do Letter Boxed. One LB had "polymethylmethacrylate" in its dictionary.
I've saved the daily dictionaries from 2024-03-30 and that's the longest word out of the 93 393 total distinct words in the 674 dictionaries I've saved. They average 1199.47 words per dictionary.
They have some truly ridiculous words, such as "troughgeng". WTF is a troughgeng? Googling that gives a couple of pages in Chinese (or a similar looking language) and a Scottish dictionary entry for "Throu" which in one of the examples of "throu" as an adverb lists a bunch of phrases is it used in, including:
> (8) througang, throw-, throoging, trough-geng, -geong (Sh., Ork.), (i) a going over or through; a passage (I.Sc. 1972); specif. (ii) a narration, a recital (of a story); (iii) a full rotation of crops, a shift; (iv) a thoroughfare, lane, passageway, corridor open at either end (Sc. 1808 Jam.; Sh. 1908 Jak. (1928); Rxb. 1923 Watson W.-B.; Ork., w.Lth., wm.Sc. 1972). Also attrib.; (v) = (5); (vi) energy, drive (Bnff. 1866 Gregor D. Bnff. 192);
"Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this. And the "wordle community" is a drop in the bucket of regular players, and not remotely representative.
I did have a similar reaction personally to the "exciting news" framing but I'm not actually sure it's wrong. The original list of words was an excellent list, and it's been over 4 years.
> "Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this.
Given that it is Wordle, “panic” would be a far more appropriate word.
Alarm, dread, scare, shock, start, worry.
Alarm is a good guess. On average I can solve a wordle in 3.6 turns when I start with this guess.
It seems about right. They reshuffled the deck about three-quarters of the way through (1689 ÷ 2315 = 72.9%). Blackjack shoes are typically shuffled around the same point. Different games, but similar considerations in this respect.
For my game redactle.net, I blacklist the Wikipedia article for 2 years. I figure there is a tradeoff between novelty and allowing the pool of articles to shrink. The Wikipedia vital level 4 category has 10k articles and probably half of them actually meet the criteria (length, number of languages etc) for making the cut.
Seems like a good post to plug a recent find and my new favourite -
https://puzzlist.com/stackdown
It's from the person who made https://wafflegame.net if you are familiar with it, one of many that came on the tails of the original Wordle.
In comparison, the Stackdown is less rushed and way more rewarding when solved. Also, more interesting in structure.
stackdown seems very hard. Took me over 10min for todays puzzle.
I've used my own tool (https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/wordle-solver/) for understanding how many words are left after each guess. It'll show hints if you want them too, but they are disabled by default. I like understanding how my guesses reduce the word space well (or not).
It uses the list of all of the words that can be in Wordle, and there are so many words I can't imagine anyone guessing. And I come from a family with large vocabularies.
My friend and I labored over the word lists for our word game subletters.fun. We wanted the word pairs and at least one optimal path for each word pair to be from words on one list, which were simpler words that we would expect everyone to be familiar with. But players could use their own more advanced vocabulary to solve the puzzles on their own without feeling restricted. Then we bundled literally 10 years of unique word pairs into the game and shipped it.
I'm surprised they weren't reusing words already.
Obviously a finite resource will run out after a while.
At the risk of being accused of obscurantism, I would like to know more of the words on the 5-letter list that are excluded by Microsoft Word.
The analysis misses a point. Wordle uses two lists of five letter words: words that are in the dictionary, and can be used in a guess; and those that can be used as the daily secret word. The latter list is smaller, and sticks to more common words. Wordle has been around for 1550 days, so they have used 67% of the possible words. In another couple of years, they have to either start using uncommon words, or recycle. There's no rush, so it's unclear why this is happening now.
> Wordle has been around for 1550 days
I'm confused. Today's Wordle is #1,688.
I did an approximate calculation.
is "valew" related to the Brazilian "valeu", expressing gratitude/satisfaction?
I am guessing a high percentage of wordle players prefer a wordle version which uses common words, and New York Times would prefer cater to those, rather than a smaller group of enthusiasts.
Maybe it should be „forked“
Connections is better anyway.
It's a very different kind of game. I don't think it's at all comparable.
My favorite right now is https://tiledwords.com/, not affiliated to it in any way, I just enjoy it.
Hey, thanks! I’m glad you’re enjoying it! (I’m the creator)
I recommend anything at https://www.merriam-webster.com/games for these sorts of games. Lots of wordle variations and all add free.
I find Quordle a much better game than Wordle, since there is some real strategy involved, but still not overly much.
Connections is infuriating.
Not only are they using regional specific knowledge, but they use regional relative concepts.
Many people do not agree that ant rhymes with aunt.
The recent Homophones of words meaning brutal.
Gorey, Grimm, Grizzly, Scarry.
I am guessin that Grimm is a eponym which makes it nebulous at best, eponyms take a lot of use to be regarded in objective terms rather than as invoking an arbartrary property of the name holder. Kafkaesque rises to that use. I don't think Grimm does.
I have no idea if Scarry is supposed to be a homonym for scary. Which it neither sounds like nor means brutal.
Perhaps there is another word that means brutal that sounds like however the person who makes connections thinks Scarry is pronounced.
In which case it would be a homonym of a synonym of brutal.
I also do not live in the same country as only connect, yet do not have such issues with their walls.
The real problem is that while you might be wrong about an answer, once you lose faith that the puzzle setter is right, you can never be sure if your guess is wrong or they are wrong. It is no longer a puzzle and you are playing 'what have I got in my pocket?'.
Isn't the point of homophones that they sound like the equivalent word, thus gory, grim, grisly, scary?
Every now and then I play quordle, octordle, and once a thousand-word variation (which breaks down gameplaywise to just getting every letter at every spot).
A bit of reuse of the same word in the one-word version can't hurt I think
It doesn't beg the question, it raises it. Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which you assume the truth of your conclusion. It doesn't mean something "begs for the question to be asked."
I have no idea why this incorrect use of the term drives me so nuts; however, you'd think a blog post about English words and Wordle wouldn't make this mistake.
I agree with you. But it's clear that "begging the question" is going the way of "literally," and there's (sadly) nothing we can do about it.
I suppose some time in the future, someone will invent a new phrase meaning "assuming your conclusion".
Well, I for one won't be party to it. I think informing everyone I can is my drop in the bucket in the fight against the incorrect usage of words. :-)
I think the idea was NYT was trying to imply they were running out.
To me, "begging the question" doesn't mean assuming the conclusion in particular, it just means that some of the premises used are less obvious than they are being passed off as. Assuming the conclusion is merely an especially egregious form of that.
I was objecting to the incorrect use of the phrase at the end of the article.