| ▲ | trothamel 13 hours ago |
| 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.) |
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| ▲ | hyperbovine 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | gretch 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 | | |
| ▲ | rhplus 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | EPEE is a common fill word from a lexicon informally known as crosswordese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosswordese Really no harder than memorizing all the 2 and 3 letter words in Scrabble and many players will pick most up in a few months. | | |
| ▲ | cyode 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I didn’t know it was called crosswordese! I wonder what the most common term used is. As a very occasional player, for some reason ARIA, IBIS, and VENI/VIDI/VICI stick out, but I’m sure it’s actually one with an E. | | |
| ▲ | all_factz 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | VENI/VIDI/VICI are easy for anyone who studied Latin (as indeed used to be common), and ARIA is similarly easy for anyone who knows about opera. Basically, the crossword is for snobs. | | |
| ▲ | swores 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree that crosswords often include cultural references that lean towards certain demographics / assuming particular education, and that can feel exclusionary if you don’t share that background - and there's even an argument to suggest snobbery might be behind those choices. But I disagree that that makes it for snobs. Snobbery is more about an attitude of looking down on others or their tastes, whereas knowing Latin or being a fan of opera is really just about exposure. Sure, there exist some (too many) opera fans who would say something like "it's real art compared to pop or hip hop being low class trash", but that's not a defining part of liking opera and plenty of people who like opera aren't snobs. Ironically it's a different form of snobbery (sometimes called reverse snobbery though personally I hate that term), to dismiss anyone who learned Latin or who likes opera as being a snob! |
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| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | busyant 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > EPEE They love that one. | | |
| ▲ | enlyth 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | And any 4 letter instrument is usually OBOE and a fish related clue is EELS | |
| ▲ | wombatpm 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you took fencing at an Ivy League school for you PR requirement you would know all about foil, saber, and epee fencing. Not everyone gets to row crew. | | |
| ▲ | hvb2 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wholly offtopic but just posting because I thought it was awesome... During Covid I saw an ad for a fencing school how it was the best sport during Covid. You wear a mask You keep your distance And if someone doesn't, you stick em with the pointy end :) |
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| ▲ | TimorousBestie 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Ask me how I know what an EPEE is That’s when you’re like, only tangentially involved with the making of a movie or tv show, but too famous to go without a credit? | |
| ▲ | ted_bunny 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ah yes, good old ARA Parseghian. That guy. |
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| ▲ | groggo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | IMO scrabble would be improved by a similar limitation. There's too many nonsense words. | | |
| ▲ | ameliaquining 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Scrabble is a competitive game, not a puzzle, and therefore subject to a different set of constraints. (Players in a competitive game are trying to win; a puzzle author, if they're any good at their job, is ultimately trying to lose.) In particular, you have to consider the equilibrium. If you only allow a subset of words in Scrabble, this replaces the competitive advantage from knowing lots of words that no one uses in real life, with a competitive advantage from knowing the exact contours of the border between acceptable and unacceptable words. I would argue that this is even worse; at least if you learn lots of Scrabble words you're learning something about the real world. By contrast, Wordle can self-impose whatever constraints they want on solutions, and people don't have to know what those constraints are in order to solve the puzzle. (It can help a little on the margin, which in a perfect world would not be the case, but it's much less of a problem for the puzzle-solving experience than the Scrabble equivalent would be.) | | |
| ▲ | enlyth 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Will Anderson has an excellent Scrabble related channel on YouTube, would recommend to anyone who is interested | |
| ▲ | groggo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ya that's a good point for competitive scrabble. However today I think a lot of people's main exposure to Scrabble comes from WordsWithFriends (and recently, the new NYT games version). In those games, there's no penalty for getting a wrong word, it just won't let you play it. In that context, I at least think it would be nice to have a setting with a more limited list... it could be like Chess timed variants. It's obviously an impossible challenge to draw those contours in language. Wordle did pretty well though! And going the other direction, just allowing everything that could possibly a word, just starts getting ridiculous. |
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| ▲ | badgersnake an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Caulk is in there, I would say that’s fairly technical. My wife didn’t know it. |
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| ▲ | knuckleheads 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | amluto 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | $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. |
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| ▲ | jonwinstanley 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes there’s no point using technically correct words if hardly anyone know them. |
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| ▲ | sobkas 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure there is, as long as your audience does. |
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| ▲ | NewJazz 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Also they seem to never use vulgar words like my opener, penis. |
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| ▲ | BurningFrog 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This may well be why the game became such a hit among everyone. |
