(I kept a copy of original wordle, and it seems to have 2,315 words that are possible answers.)
Not my experience at all.
Ask me how I know what an EPEE is
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.
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.
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/v2/9003.896ec900f2a1ce8...
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 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);
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.
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.
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.
Given that it is Wordle, “panic” would be a far more appropriate word.
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://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.
I'm more proud of a later word game that you can play free at https://wellwordgame.com/en If you give it a try, let me know what you think!
So for me, reusing words is not what I want to hear.
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.
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 :)
Since we're being pedantic about words here, it would be better to say that it "raises the question" or "prompts the question"!
Obviously a finite resource will run out after a while.
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?'.
'Gory', 'grisly', 'grim' and 'scary' do all roughly mean brutal.
'Grimm' as the name of the brothers is a red herring connection, with Gorey and Scarry also names of children's authors.
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 , which says that valew is Portuguese internet slang for valeu.)
A bit of reuse of the same word in the one-word version can't hurt I think
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 suppose some time in the future, someone will invent a new phrase meaning "assuming your conclusion".
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.
