[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

[rhplus]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

An épée is one of three types of sword used in the three styles of Western fencing. As such, it's about as technical as, say, the words "touchdown" or "mitt".

It's also just the regular French word that means "sword". But although crossword puzzles frequently ask you to know common French words, I've never seen one clue the answer EPEE that way.

[seanhunter]

Epee is not an obscure word. It's an olympic event for goodness sake.

[TimorousBestie]

> 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?

[busyant]

> EPEE

They love that one.

[ted_bunny]

Ah yes, good old ARA Parseghian. That guy.

[groggo]

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

[ameliaquining]

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.)

[wartijn_]

Wouldn’t that make Scrabble only harder and more annoying to play? With that limitation you’ll get situations where you play a perfectly valid word, but it gets rejected because it’s not in the list of approved words. To get good at that version of the game, you’ll have to study the Scrabble word list instead of the dictionary.

With Wordle the limitation is only put on the words the game generates as answers. You can use obscure words to guess, they just won’t be the answer.

[badgersnake]

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

[nasmorn]

I am not a native speaker but how does your wife name the caulk in the shower? Silicone? Or do you maintain it in such pristine condition that no word was ever spoken about it?