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trothamelyesterday at 8:08 PM5 repliesview on HN

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.)


Replies

NewJazztoday at 2:55 AM

Also they seem to never use vulgar words like my opener, penis.

hyperbovineyesterday at 10:43 PM

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.

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knuckleheadsyesterday at 10:23 PM

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.

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jonwinstanleyyesterday at 8:20 PM

Yes there’s no point using technically correct words if hardly anyone know them.

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BurningFrogyesterday at 10:33 PM

This may well be why the game became such a hit among everyone.