[HN Gopher] A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words
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A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words
Author : cyanbane
Score : 37 points
Date : 2026-02-01 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forkingmad.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (forkingmad.blog)
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| 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.
| f_allwein wrote:
| Maybe it should be ,,forked"
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| deanputney wrote:
| 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.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| The Wordle list is available here (in addition to many other
| places): https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-web-
| tools/blob/main/wordl...
| tzs wrote:
| > 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);
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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
| trothamel wrote:
| 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.)
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Yes there's no point using technically correct words if hardly
| anyone know them.
| sobkas wrote:
| 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.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Sure there is, as long as your audience does.
| knuckleheads wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This may well be why the game became such a hit among everyone.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| 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.
| gretch wrote:
| > 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
| znkynz wrote:
| Connections is better anyway.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| It's a very different kind of game. I don't think it's at all
| comparable.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I recommend anything at https://www.merriam-webster.com/games
| for these sorts of games. Lots of wordle variations and all add
| free.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I find Quordle a much better game than Wordle, since there is
| some real strategy involved, but still not overly much.
| dobladov wrote:
| My favorite right now is https://tiledwords.com/, not
| affiliated to it in any way, I just enjoy it.
| paulhebert wrote:
| Hey, thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it! (I'm the creator)
| Lerc wrote:
| 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?'.
| brikym wrote:
| 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.
| sowbug wrote:
| 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.
| furyofantares wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > "Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this.
|
| Given that it is Wordle, "panic" would be a far more
| appropriate word.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Alarm, dread, scare, shock, start, worry.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Alarm is a good guess. On average I can solve a wordle in
| 3.6 turns when I start with this guess.
| geophile wrote:
| 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.
| lkbm wrote:
| > Wordle has been around for 1550 days
|
| I'm confused. Today's Wordle is #1,688.
| geophile wrote:
| I did an approximate calculation.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| 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.
| fercircularbuf wrote:
| 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.
| arcfour wrote:
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| 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".
| arcfour wrote:
| 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. :-)
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| 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.
| arcfour wrote:
| I was objecting to the incorrect use of the phrase at the end
| of the article.
| croisillon wrote:
| is "valew" related to the Brazilian "valeu", expressing
| gratitude/satisfaction?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'm surprised they weren't reusing words already.
|
| Obviously a finite resource will run out after a while.
| angry_octet wrote:
| 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.
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