Hacker News Reader

Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

What's an example of a word that was removed? Any pattern there?

The day they moved to the NYT they removed words that could refer to the female anatomy (like "pussy"), as well as words referring to certain unpleasant concepts (e.g. slavery). They retained words referring to male genitalia (like "boner"). Make of that what you will.

I suppose they're both vulgar, but one difference is that "pussy" has a derogatory use that "boner" doesn't have.

Perhaps, but it also has an entirely innocent use that boner doesn’t. At least here in the UK it’s pretty common to use “pussy” to refer to a cat.

Pussy and boner both have innocent uses. A pussy is a cat, a boner is a silly mistake.

It seems inconsistent that dick (which can refer to a penis, a jerk, or a Richard) is still allowed, if they're worried about derogatory meanings.

Quick edit: DICKS is allowed, DICK is only 4 letters

My wife was returning something from the store Dicks. She needed the receipt and knew it had been emailed to me. A quick check and I didn’t see any such email.

So in all seriousness, while I’m at work on a open floor plain facing computer she asked me to search my spam folder for Dicks.

They removed them from the allowed guesses list, or the possible answers list? I might be convinced about removing them from the possible answers, but the allowed guesses should be basically all possible English 5-letter words. Even if they make some argument about kids typing rude words in a classroom activity, well, kids are going to do that anyway...

Removed from the allowed guesses. If you guess "slave" and hit enter you'll receive an error.

"Boner" can also mean a tremendous mistake -- negative connotation, but neither a slur nor a genitalia reference.

Which makes it distinct from a pussycat how?

They notably did not remove CUNTS.

The game has two lists -- one list that includes 'valid guesses' (things you can enter), and one that is a list of things that could actually end up as the solution.

From the possible solutions list, they removed words that have negative associations -- stuff like "slave."

From the guesses list, they mostly removed things like slurs.

What's the game's reason for having two lists instead of just one?

I assume the logic is that they shouldn't have "unusual" words as answers but shouldn't gatekeep too much about what words you enter as that would be frustrating.

A lot of valid 5-letter words are so obscure as to make the game not fun when you inevitably lose.

If the answer to a day's Wordle was QIBLA or AALII or RAHUI, I'd probably stop playing.

Here's the full list of valid guesses. There are a lot of words here that most people don't know.

https://gist.github.com/cfreshman/cdcdf777450c5b5301e439061d...

At least in the first version of the game, the 'solutions' list was actually just a sequential list of what the answer would be for each given day. So, calling them 'possible solutions' on my part was actually a little misleading (sorry), there's no probability going on or anything like that. Not sure if NYT changed it.

The value is that we all get the same answer, so which makes it more fun to compare our results (this does mean that you can just cheat and look up the answer, and it might have been possible to obscure the list somehow, but probably getting into an escalating war with cheaters was not a priority for such a simple little free game).

https://boingboing.net/2022/02/11/pussy-pupal-and-agora-amon... "Lynch", "slave", a series of racial slurs, etc.

A previous post here has the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30294688

Reply on news.ycombinator.com