Defend The Indefensible: Wordle

i will never take time from my busy important life to play a daily word game but i greatly like the way wordle's soothing untranslateable abstract pattern pops up to interrupt the relentless harshness of my war-torn TL its like visual ASMR from donald judd

Once I realized there was no skill involved, and heaps of luck, and few don't eventually guess the word, I quickly stopped playing. But I concede there's probably something soothing to that for some folks. Not everything has to be doing the Times crossword in pen with the timer going.

lest we forget (images lost to time):
mastermind, the game

^pvmic

played Mastermind a lot as a kid

anyway was coming here to agree with you all that Wordle hate is futile (and passe) in March 2022 but I did just see #WordleTheAlbum trending on UK Twitter so

Yes, let's reserve our hate for the Wordle Movie (coming spring 2024)

Sounds like a Pokemon character already.

I love Quordle and play it every day. So does my bf and my mom. Idk why anybody wouldn’t enjoy it except that they find people sharing their results tiresome, but it was fun the other day to scratch my head at JUNTO and Google “junto” and get back all these people on Twitter screaming “wtf is a JUNTO?!”

^seconded

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it. I suspect it will be a very long time before we see a word repeated, but ones in common usage will be fewer and farther between until then.

I do find the copycats thing annoying as they spring up so quickly it feels cynical and like skilled people not busy enough in their job are just hanging around waiting for someone else to prove something is worth their precious time and effort. Ah wait this has kinda been my life MO minus the actual success and now I am too busy.

This garbage psy-op robot nonsense

look dude I understand not wanting to have any part of the latest trend but you clearly don't even understand what Wordle is

to be clear i'm not a Wordle "adherent" and i don't post about Wordle on social media - but it's really actually harmless

@ johnny fever are you suggesting that ..... we are running out of words after 200 games?

.....

Nope, I'm just guessing that Wardle, when developing the game, probably used a lot of commonly used words first before poring over his dictionary for stretching out the game's lifespan. NYT is still following the original game's numbering and wordlist afaik, so the words are only going to get more obscure before it circles around and gets easy again.

so its creator is called Wardle ffs

I feel this fact will have been discussed to death on corners of the web I've thankfully not encountered yet

some words that have already appeared as answers: rebut, humph, whelp, wooer, agora (last one removed by nyt). i'm guessing he randomised the list (of 2315 words, enough for over 6 years of gameplay), which was already had very obscure words filtered out by his girlfriend.

wooer some bullshit

Semantle is better

I like it because it's only once a day--it's impossible to develop the kind of addiction I have to internet Scrabble and internet backgammon. Half the time I forget to even check for that day's Wordle. I've done about 40--only got it in two once. I don't think I'd ever post on Facebook about it...though I do post Scrabble screenshots here and on Facebook.

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it.

(xps & ledge has already got there first but)

I agree that this could happen (though have not paused to guess how many five letter words might be reasonably familiar to most people) but the 3rd and 4th Wordle answers were "sissy" and "humph"!

Can only imagine the reaction to those on Twitter now, "sissy" with a triple letter and a word I would not care to use in conversation unless very obviously joking, and "humph" right on the onomatopoeic word-or-not faultline (although I think it came up in Dordle or Quordle or Octordle recently).

(Yes I have been playing all 4 of these games lately; Wordle is a nice quick thing to do when you have a spare minute, and Quordle hits the a better sweet spot for actual puzzliness for me. Octordle is just too much, although possibly only because the UI is horrible and you can only see two of the words at once.)

Once I realized there was no skill involved, and heaps of luck

Half agree with this. One weird thing is that getting it in two (where's there's at least some reasoning involved) is more impressive than getting it in one (100% blind luck). I feel like I've used a lot of reasoning in the ones I've gotten in three and four.

I mean there’s the same amount of luck involved as other letter guessing games like wheel of fortune & hangman

xp yes, picking a second or third guess to eliminate as many alternatives as possible is definitely something you can do to improve on blind luck.

here's a few out of many non obscure words in the last 50 or so (apologies if anyone remembers this six years from now and complains about spoilers): hello, adult, rival, piece.

I'd say getting it in 2 is mostly just luck, though you can boost your chances a bit, and there can be a large amount of luck even with the 3s; if you're unlucky and/or don't pause to think through all the options you can lose, but most players will get there in less than 6 most days. So from the game design point of view Wordle is not perfect, but it's a fun enough pastime for a tea break, anyway.

And I admit when I see the green and yellow squares popping up I mostly think "nobody cares how many you got it in" (but yes, I've still talked about the day's puzzles online, so guilty too) but it's kind of nice to see the internet talking about something so harmless imo.

Working from home, I get to watch a TV quiz show called "Lingo".

This, basically, is the same as Wordle. Or so it seems.

I have not signed onto "Wordle" or anything similar, as the TV show is enough already.

(xp to self) Or, a month ago there were a lot of squares on my timeline and I'd think "nobody cares" but now there aren't so many, so when they do pop up it can be vaguely interesting to see if I can work backwards a bit to guess what word the poster started with.

(If I know them well enough to care at all what random words they typed into a webpage, which tbh is probably a stupid thing to think about at all.)

I just tried Semantle! God it is hard. I guessed the second-closest word on my 25th guess then spent my next twenty guesses on variations of that word instead of... something immediately adjacent to that word

Wordle is fine. I'm less interested in it now that it's on the Times website, and presumably will be paywalled soon. I still do them some days. It was fun when it was just a random web thing, sort of felt like a 90s internet throwback. I knew it wouldn't last that way.

I think its neat that it's a one-a-day thing and everyone gets the same word. the communal aspect of that is cool & I like that it only asks for a couple minutes of your day. watching Twitter bitch about a word like TACIT is kinda fun

Yeah, this. I don't post my own results on social media, but my wife and text them to each other every morning, and I'll occasionally chime in on someone else's Wordle post. I think it's a charming little game, with a charming little backstory, and it's charming that the dude got a million bucks from the NYT for something he made just for fun. Hard for me to see the harm.

my wife and I, that should say.

man alive otm

the original site's code was 100% client-side so you could just save the webpage to your computer and it would work offline for another 6 years until it runs out of words. i.e. it was made in a way thats impossible to paywall. the times basically just bought the name & idea.

My favorite thing was the pissy person on Twitter who scraped the word list from the code and made a bot that would post spoilers for tomorrow's word on everyone's results, I have never been irritated by something so much that it made me go out of my way to be an ass to people I don't know

i found the posts a little annoying at first, but now i don't care

I like it. It's like when people used to do the crossword on their commutes but now they do it before they start their day WFH

That person is a cunt but that was kinda funny, also the fact that they got banned within like a day - Twitter does have community standards! xp

yeah 100%

taylordle.com

Once I realized there was no skill involved, and heaps of luck, and few don't eventually guess the word

Getting the word is a given, the fun part is getting it in as few tries as possible imo.

I usually do it within a few moments of waking up, posting squares is lame though.

not skill but knowledge, the bigger your vocabulary the better obv

Wordle is mmorpg daily quests for boomers and the NYT ruling class. And that's okay.

I do wordle and quordle every night and have a running competition with my partner. It's become a midnight routine. Agree with a passing spacecadet that quordle is the copycat that feels like a real game and not a gimmick. Octordle is just ridiculous for the sake of it. And the quordle UI is good, they've gotten it so the whole playing board fits on your screen at once

I dislike the culture of secrecy-at-all-costs around wordle. People can get so weird about acknowledging any aspect of the word itself, even if it's like deep in someone's Twitter replies where no one would go if they hadn't already done the word that day. People will get weird when someone else types out yesterday's word. Can only assume this type of person is aroused by the inherent taboo of wordle

those are the same people that say "you telling me you enjoyed the show is a spoiler!!!"

run through wordle, quordle and octordle at midnight - it's not really rewarding at this point but it's like doing sudoku on my phone when I'm waiting around staring at the wall. Five minutes to run through all three, a miniscule serotonin hit at having won something.

I am obsessed with sedecordle now

If ever a word should have been solved in one try--I took five--it's "karma." Sorry, John Lennon.

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it.

I thought the dude (and his partner) pared down the list to 2,500 or so familiar five-letter words, and then hit a randomizer that essentially set the word list for the next 6+ years. So there's no reason to think that earlier words were any more familiar than current or later ones.

Someone mentioned that upthread. I didn't know the backstory.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/does-wordle-prove-that-we-can-have-nice-things-on-the-internet

Wardle's background is interesting.

For whatever reason, maybe random, I feel like there've been more of those words where three or four of letters can work in the same order in a bunch of different words.

My strategy is very much 'solve in six' rather than 'solve as quickly as possible' (my first three words all mix three consonants/two vowels, and I won't *not* use those three words unless I know four letters after two (or one) guesses.) Skilled players who go for quicker solutions can get a better average score (e.g., Dan S) but may fail to solve in six more often.

Never tried 'hard setting', or Quordle, or Octordle. . .

xp Tipsy -- agreed; words like JOLLY where there are multiple rhyming words one letter off are landmines.

For whatever reason, I only have stats for the past couple of months. I try to keep my average guesses below 3, which I am just barely on the right side of at the moment:

1: 0
2: 4
3: 30
4: 23
5: 8
6: 2

I have never gotten it in 1, nor do I expect to. My opening word is one that is technically in the dictionary, but is much too uncommon* to ever be the daily puzzle. But it gives me a lot of information, and I've used it for years, so we work well together.

I do not play on Hard Mode and I am strongly averse to the idea of doing so. My second guess often omits some of the letters I found with my first guess, which is critical to solving it in 3. Also, I am not enough of a gambler to do the "GOLLY, HOLLY, JOLLY, DOLLY" roulette, when I could spend a guess on "JUDGE" and keep my streak going.

*: Pre-NYT there was a rule in place that the daily puzzle was drawn from the top (something thousand) most common words in the Wordle dictionary. While I don't know for sure that this remains the case, I do allow my guesses to be swayed by the relative obscurity of certain words that I know people would grumble about, including my own starting word: APORT

I've never gotten it in 1. Although I almost always play SLATE as my opening guess these days, I must not have used it in Dec. 2022, when that was the word. (I changed up my opening guess more often back then.)

So now, as long as I keep playing SLATE, I won't get it in 1 until they start reusing words, which probably won't happen for a long time.

My second guess often omits some of the letters I found with my first guess, which is critical to solving it in 3

the only way to play imo

I try to keep my average guesses below 3, which I am just barely on the right side of at the moment

iirc it’s impossible to have an average score above 3.2 or something in the long run (based on posts where people simulate thousands of wordles with optimal guesses)? nice scores regardless

My first is “scout”

They've been re-using words for a while now.

No they haven't!

I YIELD but really do feel like a BUNCH of words have come up more than once (no examples SORRY).

VALID

My only got-it-in-1 was NOISE, my starter word. Was going to change it after, but nah. I've got my guess #2 words all set depending on how guess #1 goes. 3s are currently leading 5s, but 6s lead 2s with 4 as my usual.

As of April 28, 2024, Wordle has never repeated a word that has already been used as an answer before, but since the number of 5-letter words is limited, it is inevitable that words will be repeated eventually.

Wordle began on June 18, 2021 with the first word being "CIGAR". The current possible answers list contains 2310 words, which means Wordle will run out of new words on October 15, 2027 unless they add more words to the list.

https://wordlesolver.app/faqs/repeat

I can't be alone in my error, maybe it stems from having played the same word so close to the answer more than once. I've got a bad misremembrance-by-association habit like that.

My first is TRIES, which afaik has never come up - my second's POLKA, which I think was some time last year? My third's DUNGY, which lol will never come up.

Which reminds me - the wordle bot will sometimes remark that a word is a good or bad guess but not likely to be an answer. It's doing that because the developers went through the 15000 possible words and cut them down to 4500 (as they point out in their FAQ, there's already been answers that are missing from the original 2300 list). And so that's part of the edge that they have, that their algorithm is tilted towards those words. But instead of saying that, they say "based on what I've learned playing Wordle", creating an image of some War Games situation where it's speed-played through all of the words in the real Wordle dictionary (which may not exist)

are you sure that wordlebot knows the true word list? i didn’t think that was the case. wordlebot seems to do have a prior on what kind of word is more likely to be in the words list; i.e. when there are only two possible words left it doesn’t just flip a coin but has a (“subjective”) probability of which one is more likely. i thought i’d read that over time it learns which words are more likely to be wordle list words, and that the developers tweak some parameters of the model that eg allow it to use more obscure words as guesses more often

Yeah, the original WordleBot "knew" the list of possible solutions but since the launch of WordleBot 2.0 it no longer does https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/upshot/wordle-wordlebot-new.html

iirc it’s impossible to have an average score above 3.2 or something in the long run (based on posts where people simulate thousands of wordles with optimal guesses)?

good point. i certainly don’t remember, though i wonder if they’ll slowly start seeding previously used words back in as we get closer to using up the original word list

are you sure that wordlebot knows the true word list?

No, I'm certain they don't! I mean, they probably know the 15,000 "every five letter word" list, but I didn't mean to imply that they know the word list. Like I say, it might not exist, Tracy Bennett might just pick a new word every day. Though Wikipedia suggests otherwise?

She made adjustments to Wordle, which was a new acquisition by the Times from its creator, creating a variety of level-of-difficulty throughout a week's puzzles and varying the lexical and semantical types of words from day to day, adding and removing words from the database, limiting the inclusion of words that have too many identical four-letter patterns in common with other words, avoiding words that are spelled differently in other versions of English, and experimenting with a themed entry on Thanksgiving Day. She considers the implications of words related to current news and researches possible offensive alternative uses of words. She has received pushback from players about themed entries.

Hrm, worth quoting the Worldlebot FAQ, which seems more recent than those references:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/16/upshot/wordlebot-faq.html

The original Wordle game ran off a 2,309-word “solution list,” but that list is no longer the official reference. There have now been published solutions that did not appear on the original list — like BALSA and KAZOO — and a handful of words on the list that are unlikely to pass the scrutiny of Times editors.

ah ok i don’t fully understand what you’re saying here then

It's doing that because the developers went through the 15000 possible words and cut them down to 4500 (as they point out in their FAQ, there's already been answers that are missing from the original 2300 list). And so that's part of the edge that they have, that their algorithm is tilted towards those words. But instead of saying that, they say "based on what I've learned playing Wordle", creating an image of some War Games situation where it's speed-played through all of the words in the real Wordle dictionary (which may not exist)

my understanding is there’s two lists wordlebot knows

1. a list of permissible guess words that is smaller than the list of permissible guess words we have access to (although they occasionally tweak it to allow it to use more obscure words as e.g. second guess)

2. a list of permissible solution words that is larger than the actually existing list of solution words

wordlebot doesn’t know the list of solution words, but it knows not all words in 2 are solution words, and as it plays it updates a model of which word is more likely to be a solution word. that’s how i interpret it saying “what i’ve learned plying wordle”—i.e. it learned by playing all games so far

Is the full list of daily solutions (as currently stands) still held in the JavaScript if you peek? I obviously don't want to look into it for fear of spoilers but I know that well into the NYT era I would be so impatient that I'd be playing a day ahead of everyone else by just changing the date on my iPhone. And in the past you could upload a grid to WordleBot that came from an unofficial "make your own Wordle" site and it would recognise it and say "this looks like a board for game 1560" or whatever even if Wordle itself was only up to game 800 or whatever.

lol that’s dedicated hacking

If I click "did you beat the bot?" and then "read my analysis of today's wordle", the bot gives skill and luck levels for my choices, which I don't generally believe at all. I'm often surprised to find that my skill level is below the NYT avg.

When I guess a word in 3 or 4, it is sometimes because after one or two words, depending on my success, I can work out as many outcomes as possible, write them down, consider which letters are most used, and choose a second or third word that I know is not the solution but which eliminates as many other words as possible. Sometimes I'm successful, not always.

Then the bot often says something inane and gives me a low skill score, like today after my second choice - "this guess wasn't my favorite, but you lucked out! You narrowed it down to two remaining words" - which would be insulting if it wasn't so funny.

i think the way they do it is skill is calculated a priori (expectation of how few words remain over all possible solution words) and luck is how much further your guess was ex post than that prior average. so it should reward you with a high skill score for that procedure. might be you missed some possible words when making the list (i do something similar when i have time, it’s hard to be exhaustive)

But I don't see how my skill is less than the NYT average, or how their determination that I'm lucky is actually because of luck.

From the bot it seems like the NYT players' score averages are amazing for this, with a very high skill level

im with you on the nyt average thing. pisses me off to see how close i am to the average whenever i think im on an absolute hot streak. i think part of the problem is the way they normalize the scores there’s very little variance, so you might have a skill 1 or 2 points higher than nyt average but be at the 90th percentile. at least that’s what i tell myself..

A terrible 5 today with three attempts to guess just the first and final letter.

If you can recall any past solutions, until 2027 your chances should slowly improve.

What is this sorcery?! I can rarely remember yesterday's word

Ha ha - my recall can't claim to be very good but some more distinctive words do stick in my head. And it helps that I'm in a WhatsApp group for it with three pals as the associated discussion might help to lodge things a bit better.

I hate it when my first word leaves me with an A in the middle and an E at the end, which has happened at least a few times in recent memory. No matter how many consonants or vowels I think of to add to the second choice, there are so many possibilities that answer is always elusive

yesterday's was a close SHAVE - on my fifth guess I had SHA_E, with V M D K and L still available

Yeah, I had SHAME on my second guess, but it took me all 6 to get to SHAVE argh.

I got that one in 3 which is about the only time Wordle has been kind to me in the last few months

Back to 4 today sigh