[trothamel]

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.)

[hyperbovine]

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]

> 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

[groggo]

IMO scrabble would be improved by a similar limitation. There's too many nonsense words.

[badgersnake]

Caulk is in there, I would say that’s fairly technical. My wife didn’t know it.

[knuckleheads]

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.

[amluto]

$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.

[jonwinstanley]

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

[sobkas]

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]

Sure there is, as long as your audience does.

[NewJazz]

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

[BurningFrog]

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