12 ms·
A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 8mo agoI 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.
- f_allwein 8mo agoMaybe it should be „forked“
- hombre_fatal 8mo ago1. 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.
- deanputney 8mo agoI 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.
- SecretDreams 8mo agoYou may want to swap out aahed if that's what you're rocking.
- xnorswap 8mo agoHave you checked it didn't come up before you started?
- kimos 8mo agoMy favourite starter word has come and gone. So I’m in the opposite situation where I feel relieved to be able to go back to using it.
- pseudosavant 8mo agoThe Wordle list is available here (in addition to many other places): https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-web-tools/blob/main/wordle-solver/valid-words.csv https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-web-tools/blob/main/wordl...
- venusenvy47 8mo agoHas anyone confirmed if they still use only this original list? I would think the NY Times could change the word list however they choose.
- Rebelgecko 8mo agoThey changed some words pretty much right after the acquisition. There was some controversy when they started doing "themed" words (like Christmas stuff in December) vs more "random" words. Some words were also removed for having negative vibes/political liability
- julianz 8mo agoThey removed WENCH from the list of upcoming solutions fairly quickly, but forgot to add it back to the list of available words so you couldn't use it as a guess for a little while. It made it back to the list eventually.
- pseudosavant 8mo agoI believe these lists are more like what is described in the blog post. Diction of words, filtered to 5 letter words, no plurals, etc. It most likely has 99%+ of the words, but maybe some they don't actually use in Wordle.
- tzs 8mo ago> 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);
- thaumasiotes 8mo ago> people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed" That isn't a correct diagnosis; people have heard of aahed. You'll find it naturally in the expression "[someone] oohed and aahed". People don't want aahed, and their instinct that it shouldn't count is reasonable, but unfamiliarity isn't the problem with it.
- zarzavat 8mo agoOoh and aah aren't words, they're sounds (onomatopoeia). A sound is just a sequence of letters used for their phonological values. You can spell the sound "ah" however you like: ah, ahh, aah, aahh, there's no wrong way to spell it. If you write "the washing machine tringged when it finished", 'tring' is not a word, even though it's following the rules of English morphology, you could have written any sequence of letters that most faithfully reproduces the sound of the washing machine. You could have written katrigged or puh-tringged.
- thaumasiotes 8mo agoThat is false; the fact that you can conjugate aah (or tring) into the past tense is sufficient to prove it's a word.
- paulcole 8mo agoOoh and aah most certainly are words. Is meow not a word? Can I spell it miough and sit smugly correct?
- housecarpenter 8mo agoIt's true that onomatopoeia isn't always a word, but in the particular case of "aah", I think that particular choice of letters is conventionalized enough that it is a word.
- seanhunter 8mo agoThe oxford english dictionary disagrees with you. https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=ooh https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=ooh "Ooh" is most certainly a word. As is both "Ah" and "Aah" https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ah_int?tab=factsheet#8068455 https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ah_int?tab=factsheet#8068455 https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=aah https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=aah
- Aardwolf 8mo agoEvery 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
- trothamel 8mo agoIf 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.)
- jonwinstanley 8mo agoYes there’s no point using technically correct words if hardly anyone know them.
- sobkas 8mo agoLanguage 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.
- hyperbovine 8mo agoSure there is, as long as your audience does.
- knuckleheads 8mo agoYes, 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.
- amluto 8mo ago$200? Does this use reasoning? Does it involve forgetting to use KV caching? This should cost well under $1. Process the prompt. Then, for each word, input that word and then the end of prompt token, get your one token of output (maybe two if your favorite model wants to start with a start-of-reply token), and that’s it.
- znkynz 8mo agoConnections is better anyway.
- AndrewDucker 8mo agoIt's a very different kind of game. I don't think it's at all comparable.
- AnotherGoodName 8mo agoI recommend anything at https://www.merriam-webster.com/games https://www.merriam-webster.com/games for these sorts of games. Lots of wordle variations and all add free.
- BurningFrog 8mo agoI find Quordle a much better game than Wordle, since there is some real strategy involved, but still not overly much.
- dobladov 8mo agoMy favorite right now is https://tiledwords.com/ https://tiledwords.com/, not affiliated to it in any way, I just enjoy it.
- paulhebert 8mo agoHey, thanks! I’m glad you’re enjoying it! (I’m the creator)
- abosherid 8mo agoIt’s become tradition in my house to play tiled words with my wife just before bed. It’s the last thing we do together before falling asleep each night! Thanks for bringing us together with a bit of joy!
- paulhebert 8mo ago
- brikym 8mo agoFor 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.
- sowbug 8mo agoIt 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.
- furyofantares 8mo ago"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.
- teeray 8mo ago> "Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this. Given that it is Wordle, “panic” would be a far more appropriate word.
- alexfoo 8mo agoAlarm, dread, scare, shock, start, worry.
- hyperbovine 8mo agoAlarm is a good guess. On average I can solve a wordle in 3.6 turns when I start with this guess.
- ted_bunny 8mo agoRepeated letters are wasted utility. Wouldn't that make it suboptimal for a first move?
- muti 8mo agoSuboptimal - likely. There is some utility: a green letter is more useful than a yellow. Checking for a in two locations when a is a very commonly used letter is __useful__. Still likely much more useful to check for the presence of a fifth letter than a chance at knowing more precisely the location of an a.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 8mo agoI used to use alert, until it was the word one day (got it in one!). Then I switched. Apparently I should switch back, since it could be the word again.
- geophile 8mo agoThe 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.
- pseudosavant 8mo agoI've used my own tool (https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/wordle-solver/ 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.
- fercircularbuf 8mo agoMy 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.
- arcfour 8mo agoIt 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.
- slibhb 8mo agoI 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".
- arcfour 8mo agoWell, 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. :-)
- mauvehaus 8mo agoWhen you win that battle, would you please fight iOS predictive text vs proper apostrophe use next?
- fsckboy 8mo agoassuming your conclusion, why would we need a new phrase?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- viccis 8mo agoAt what point did dictionaries providing descriptive views of the English languages turn into a prescriptive one that emboldens people to just point to repeated wrong usage rather than admit they were wrong?
- croisillon 8mo agois "valew" related to the Brazilian "valeu", expressing gratitude/satisfaction?
- thaumasiotes 8mo agoDepends on your point of view. The most direct thing we can say is "no, because there is no such word as valew". It's not in Merriam-Webster, it's not in Samuel Johnson's 18th-century dictionary, it's not in the Collins dictionary (for British English). It is in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is noted as a "[spelling] variant of value" from the 14th century. It has never been a word with any other meaning than that of value, and using it now would be a pure error if someone used it, which obviously nobody will ever do. Accepting it in Wordle makes as much sense as accepting vvest on the theory that that was an acceptable spelling of west in the past. There is an etymological connection between Portuguese valeu and English value, in that they both descend from Latin valeo, but value has no sense of gratitude or satisfaction. (I'm guessing the blog author was misled by https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valew#Portuguese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valew#Portuguese , which says that valew is Portuguese internet slang for valeu.)
- croisillon 8mo agothanks a lot!
- huhtenberg 8mo agoSeems like a good post to plug a recent find and my new favourite - https://puzzlist.com/stackdown https://puzzlist.com/stackdown It's from the person who made https://wafflegame.net 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.
- mastermedo 8mo agostackdown seems very hard. Took me over 10min for todays puzzle.
- huhtenberg 8mo agoIt gets easier with practice, but sometimes some words are very difficult to find. Hints help though.
- timenotwasted 8mo agoHopefully this is an ok place to plug my own word game, https://spellrush.com/ https://spellrush.com/. It's very different from Wordle but that was a conscious decision since there are so many clones out there these days. Really wanted to put a fresh spin on word games.
- bmalicoat 8mo agoThat's cool to see. I made a mobile game, Downwordly, that has the same mechanic in its puzzle mode. It came out almost five years ago and still has a decent set of versus players. I'm more proud of a later word game that you can play free at https://wellwordgame.com/en https://wellwordgame.com/en If you give it a try, let me know what you think!
- BurningFrog 8mo agoI'm surprised they weren't reusing words already. Obviously a finite resource will run out after a while.
- angry_octet 8mo agoAt 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.
- werdnapk 8mo agoI've been waiting years for my word to be my first guess and still nothing... it's been my opener for years. I know my word hasn't been used as I've checked the list of used words. So for me, reusing words is not what I want to hear.
- windowshopping 8mo agoIf anyone's looking for new word games, I built The Daily Baffle which might appeal to some of you. Check it out at dailybaffle.com!
- iambateman 8mo agoThis is lame. The original creator of Wordle would’ve been more Spiny.
- fortran77 8mo agoI start with the same word every day. I hate to change it, because I want the joy of getting the wordle in 1 someday.
- A1kmm 8mo agoThey just need more bits of entropy - going from IPv4 to IPv6 involved quadrupling it, but this transition is much more minor. They could just go to 6 characters for now, and go to 7 later.
- jedberg 8mo ago6 characters would be vastly harder. You'd need more than six rows for sure.
- jackgavigan 8mo agoYet the current word list apparently doesn't include "Irish" (even though Welsh, Scots and Brits are all valid). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- thxg 8mo agoThe original Wordle came with a pre-baked ordered list of 2315 "secret" words, off which the daily secret word was looked up (I think based on local time). The list was right there in the javascript code of the game (alongside the list of 12972 allowed guess words). It covered dates from 2021-06-19 to 2027-10-20. Then in January 2022, the NYT bought Wordle, and started tweaking both lists, first shrinking the secret word list to 2309 entries, but leaving the logic otherwise intact. Fast forward to today, I looked up the current code [1], and it seems that there are now 14855 allowed words. The first 12546 are ordered alphabetically (0: "aahed", 12545: "zymic"), and the next 2309 are not. This may suggest that the latter are the secret words, but the logic for picking them has changed: I found no obvious sequence, when compared to the last few days' secret words. So it's either a more complex sequence, or the secret word is picked server-side. In any case, I guess they decided to re-shuffle the list now at day 1689 / 2309 in order to avoid giving particularly assiduous player an additional bit of information: they can exclude all previous secret words. (To be accurate, I think this would be 1.897 bits, but my information theory is rusty.) [1] https://www.nytimes.com/games-assets/v2/9003.896ec900f2a1ce8d7a1f.js https://www.nytimes.com/games-assets/v2/9003.896ec900f2a1ce8...
- peesem 8mo agoWordle now credits an "Editor" for each day, so I guess that person is the one who hand-picks the word for that day?
- oliwary 8mo agoIn https://squareword.org https://squareword.org (2D variant) I was also running into this problem. It's a bit different though, since I need to find valid 5x5 squares, with 5 words down and 5 across. Surprisingly, there is quite a limited number of such squares. Ive been able to solve it by slowly injecting more challenging words over time, which has the side effect of also introducing a difficulty gradient. Players seem happy so far :)
- wheybags 8mo agoAs someone who recently built a daily word game[1], I 100% get it. I can say from first hand experience: there's an awful lot of words that are totally valid but not fun. I spent approximately as much time on building the word list as I did developing the game. The author's technique of just grabbing a word list and spellchecking it is completely not sufficient, you will get so many weird unfamiliar words in there. In the end I was able to whittle down my list to about 24,000 using various automatic methods, but from that point I just had to do a manual review on the remaining list, which meant I got to see a lot of words, and many of them felt very obscure and/or not fun. 1: shameless plug: https://wheybags.com/turntiles https://wheybags.com/turntiles
- anshumankmr 8mo agoWhy not add a character (for fun?) The weekend game can be 6 characters and the regular one 5 characters?
- marssaxman 8mo ago> So that does beg the question: Since we're being pedantic about words here, it would be better to say that it "raises the question" or "prompts the question"!