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Show HN: Hebrew Wordle

wordleheb.web.app

132 pointsputtycat87 comments

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I see your hebrew wordle and raise you yiddish wordle https://www.jiconway.com/vertl/

And yet another Yiddish Wordle! https://greenwichmeanti.me/wordle/

Thank you for being a mensch.

Fantastish!

Oy vey

My favourite Wordle thing is still the adversarial one, by the creator of Hatetris:

https://qntm.org/files/wordle/index.html

I wonder whether it is maximally adversarial.

SPOILER

At first I tried to solve starting with 'raise'. This led me down a path were I got words that fit '_ o _ _ y' which fits way too many words. I managed to solve it in 6 words by following a different strategy: Open up with 'lysin', this gives zero hits and then I played more standard which was easy because I didn't end up in a situation where I can't distinguish between options.

It’s probably not as-adversarial-as-possible in the sense of maximizing the minimum number of guesses to win. From playing in an ad hoc way I found TINES->BOARD->LUMPY->CLUCK->FLUFF which wins in 5 moves. I feel like an even harder variant would “herd” you towards cases where you’re forced to guess consonants one or two at a time.

I also ended up in the '_ o _ _ y' scenario, which for me terminated at JOLLY, but I wonder if there's something about applying "standard" Wordle strategies to the adversarial version that seems to lead people down this road.

In that scenario, it can be helpful to try words that you know will fail, just to exhaust more unused letters in one guess.

True, but I feel that is not in the spirit of the game.

I think the "problem" is that with decent play, the space of valid words simply isn't big enough for a game to drag out very long. The space of English words is in the tens of thousands, which is only 15-ish bits, and every guess is quite a few bit's worth of info (varies depending on what you put in, but with good guessing it's quite a few). As the author says, about the worst case you can get into is having all but one letter correct, for some letter that can be many different letters. But a decent player just isn't going to get the sort of quality adversarial gameplay you can get from Hatetris or something. The Wordle challenge is in getting it in 5, and even that isn't that hard for a casual word game enthusiast.

Absurdle is static - once you get a word in four it's beaten forever. The spirit of Wordle means it's better to always re-use your successful guesses, but Absurdle has no target word. It's a game of filtering the word list down to only one candidate as fast as you can.

This HN poster had the same idea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864418

Cool! How does it handle סופית letters like ך /ח? Like totally separate letters?

For the non-Hebrew speakers, Hebrew has some letters that change form when placed at the end of the word. The Hebrew keyboard has these forms in their own key, but colloquially they're the same letter.

You mean צ / ץ פ / ף כ / ך

And it does seem to treat them like totally different letters. They are the same though I'm not sure what will be more fun to play. Note that Hebrew has fewer letters to begin with (22 not counting those).

OP here. We actually count them as the same letter for “yellow” boxes, only the keyboard separates them into different keys (this is explained in the help screen).

Oh sorry, I thought it didn't get selected...

Thanks!

I only know the very little hebrew that I learned a looong time ago while volunteering in a kibbutz, but I managed to guess today's word in 5 guesses: https://twitter.com/kseistrup/status/1483869736014393352

Since we are sharing variants in different languages, here's Norwegian: https://www.fiveletters.xyz/no/five

#somebodyshould make a danish version…

I can modify my swedish one to do danish. Do you know of any good word lists? For all valid words I can use /usr/share/dict/danish. But do you know of any list that only has good clue words? I'm looking for something like https://scrabbleforening.wordpress.com/ordlister/ord-med-4-b... but for five letters

I can easily give you a list of all valid 5-letter words in Danish. Would that do?

PS: I'm unsure how the clue thing works?

Take the word "lampa". You have versions of the word: "lampor", "lampan" and so on. The correct word for each day should only be of the type "lampa". No "bending". That is the word list that I'm looking for. But you should be able to guess words that are "bent". Those I can get from /usr/share/dict/danish

I'm pretty sure I can give you a list of all 5-letter Danish words in the “lampa” form, but I need to work on it because I have to pour them through a filter first, and then manually inspect the thousands of words remaining.

Can we take this conversation to email? You can find my email address at https://kas.bio.link/ and I'm perfectly fine if you write in Swedish (if I may reply in Danish).

Here is the first attempt: https://ordlek.github.io/ordlek/dansk/

Hope you like it :)

I do! But it seems somebody beat us to it: https://xn--wrdle-vua.dk/

There is! It's called wørdle.dk :)

LOL! I love the domain name!!

I think this won't work so well in Hebrew. As an example, SPOILER ALERT, Today's word starts in ב, and when I try to think of words starting in ב, I'm constantly thinking of words where "ב" acts as the "in-" prefix for a word. I think in English this never happens as unlike Hebrew, I can't think of a letter than can act as a meaningful prefix.

*SPOILER for today's Wordle* *** *** Eventually, today's word is בהחלט in which ב can be considered as a prefix since ב-החלט -- "in decisiveness". ** ** *****

"I think in English this never happens as unlike Hebrew, I can't think of a letter than can act as a meaningful prefix."

a on its own can be a few different prefixes: https://www.etymonline.com/word/a-?ref=etymonline_crossrefer... Many of the examples cited in that will strike a modern English speaker as simply being the word, such as "amethyst" which was news to me, but we have moral -> amoral, sexual -> asexual, and a few others.

I certainly agree I've never thought of this in the context of a word game, as opposed to the s suffix which is almost mandatory in Boggle, for instance.

True. "A" does play a similar role. The thing with "A" is that there are relatively few words where it could be applied, while in Hebrew, almost every noun and verb I can think of can have a "ב" prefix.

I agree totally. I saw this more as an interesting "natural" word trivia challenge than any disagreement on my part.

Well, I always think of five letter plurals that end in S, even when I know there is no S in that position.

True, but in English I think this is more of a suffix thing, for example you can have words like "soft"->"softly", "poll->polls". I think this effect is much more subtle when this happens with a suffix rather than a prefix.

Are we playing a different game? By me the word starts with a "מ"

Interesting. My gf gave it a go after I did and she like you got a word starting with מ.

I made a french version last weekend https://motle.fac3.org

There is also https://wordle.louan.me/ FWIW.

Very cool, I was able to get the word after 3 guesses. I guess learning French has actually been paying off for me!

On my phone the colours of the letters in the keyboard didn't upgrade from yellow to green. Great otherwise!

If you get the word right on your 6th guess, the game still counts it as if you lost in the stats.

thx, I'll fix that.

My daily reminder that שכחתי את כל העברית שלי

Lo ha kol!

ברור

Portuguese: https://term.ooo/

Here is a swedish version: https://ordlek.github.io/ordlek/

(I haven't translated the ui yet, will do later this week.)

Looks very nice!

I found a typo in the first line of the initial help pop-up:

Gissa dagens ord på sex på försök!

Should of course drop the duplicated "på". Also, it was annoyingly hard to copy-paste that line since the pop-up closes whenever I try. :)

Tack!/Thanks! The typo is fixed now

We've also got romanian now: https://cuvantul.github.io/cuvantul

That was quick. I'm very impressed with your work.

I feel like you did most of the work :)

Also, from Sweclockers forum (:

https://ordlig.se/

Never played the English version, but failed miserably in the Hebrew one.

The name reminds me of Yiddish spelling (על for "el/le"). I think in Israel this specific spelling is out of fashion (but it's nice to see it)

Is it to be pronounced "wordale"?

Here is Wordle in Bulgarian: https://wordle-bg.ggerganov.com

Interesting about it is that I implemented this in C++ and OpenGL and ported it to web with Emscripten [0], so the page is basically a WebGL canvas.

[0] https://github.com/ggerganov/wordle-bg

I made Dutch wordle! https://woordle.nl

Also source (in Elm): https://github.com/pingiun/woordle/

has this game suddenly gained popularity or something?

How is it possible to have missed the Wordle mania? It has infected all layers of my social circle. I love it.

Just another anecdote but HN is the actually only place I've seen it mentioned personally

It's been all over the newspaper media here in the UK recently, and I'd had it shared a few times back in [November?] from my circle of friends. Me being me, I ignored it until it was posted here... .

Very much so: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...

Curious why this particular instance became popular. Or was it only the Netherlands where this game formed the basis for a famous gameshow?

I'm not familiar with previous versions, but I do think one big reason this one succeeded is the easy ability to share your results (through a simple copy/paste) without sharing specific guesses through emojis, which helped virality.

HN doesn't display them correctly, but one example: https://res.cloudinary.com/graham-media-group/image/upload/f...

Also the fact that it's one word a day, same for everyone, so people have a habit of doing the daily word and sharing it. It creates a community feeling. I often discuss the word with my friends like "what word did you start with?" etc after seeing their emojis.

The endless-mode Wordle copycats are just not fun and miss the whole point. I want to do the word and move on with my day, as part of a daily ritual.

Note that the game actually works off of local time, so you might actually have a different word than someone else even if you play at the same time. As soon as it hits 00:00 where you are, it switches to the next predetermined word.

Also helpful: the clean, minimalistic yet helpful interface, and most importantly no ads.

Let's not forget no sign-up/authentication. The session is stored locally, so you keep your stats as long as you use the same phone/browser each day.

Interestingly, this lean design also means the answer is stored locally, but as one commenter observed "Anyone pointing this out would have their mind blown when they learned the newspaper jumble and the answers in the corner upside-down"

These decisions would be terrible for a competitive game where folks are striving to top the HIGH SCORE tables, but are smart for an approachable little daily routine.

In the US, we had Lingo - a game show with almost an identical premise that ran from 1987-2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)

I work for a foreign language training company. I bet all of these versions in different languages would be really great tools for our students. Has anyone already started one of those "Awesome XYZ" lists on Github for all of them?

Finnish version:

https://sanuli.fi

Its implemented in Rust! https://github.com/Cadiac/sanuli

My attempt to create a German one (slightly different rules from the original): https://www.waswort.de

What are the rules then? I'm typing words and it's saying they are not legal words?

The idea is, as in the original, that for guessing you have to enter valid words. In this case, it's 6-letter words. However, it's not easy to obtain a complete list of valid 6-letter German words, so the ones you are trying might be missing. Working on it.

Cool, much easier for me than the English version.

It could be nice to treat ending letters the same as regular letters (on the keyboard), similar to the way crosswords work in Hebrew.

Cool. Is the source code up? How easy would it be to extend to other RTL languages like Yiddish, Farsi and Arabic?

Once you have the RTL most of your problems are solved, but I think it may be a problem with Perso-Arabic alphabets as letter forms change depending on the letters around it as they link into a single word, almost like cursive. I don’t think the concept would translate well into languages that use that.

Arabic crossword puzzles work just fine

תודה רבה!

I am not impressed until someone makes Gallifreyan (sp?).

> I am not impressed until someone makes Gallifreyan (sp?).

As far as I know, Gallifreyan hasn't been worked up into an actual language. Klingon could probably be done, though.

What is wordle?

Guess a five letter word in less than six tries. Word resets every day.

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Thanks for the link. I had previously seen wordle mentioned on hn and sought it out on apple’s app store. I ended up with a much different game - one that I didn’t enjoy at all. Now I see the real wordle is much more interesting.

I googled and found[1] that I’m far from the only one.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2022-01-17-dev-behind-5-y...

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