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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things.

1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary would be. It's a fun 10-15 minute puzzle.

2. Five letter seems like something of a sweet spot.

3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words.

4. It lends itself to what I'll casual cheating, i.e. there are easy ways to get some hints without giving the answers away while focusing on a strategy.

5. Basically, it's got good gameplay for a casual game. It would be easy to build something along similar lines that didn't have as fun gameplay for a casual gamer.

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#1 is why it's so successful. It's just challenging enough to make you think, but still solvable by most people. So we all get that nice dopamine rush of solving a puzzle with a reasonable perceived effort.

How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption.

To me, that's the genius - just hard enough, but not too hard. It's not a Scrabble competition, it's a fun diversion and shared challenge to experience with your friends.

I'm actually sort of a "word" person. I've written books for publishers and do a fair bit of writing for my job. But crosswords have always fallen into the too much work category for me and I've never really connected to word games in general (including Scrabble).

But, yeah, I like Wordle and it hits a sweet spot for me.

I played pretty high level Scrabble for a few years and most people who connect deeply with Scrabble are programmers, mathematicians, musicians, scientists, accountants, etc. Hardly anybody at the medium-to-high levels of play are word people.

At its core, Scrabble is just a game of probability, memory, spatial awareness, and pattern recognition. The words could be random collections of symbols.

My dream version of Scrabble would have a score system somehow based on word infrequency, so more interesting words would gain higher scores, exactly to mitigate the phenomenon you describe here.

It’s a fun thought but how do you define infrequency and what is an interesting word?

ANESTRI is a very uncommon word by most “normal” measures (it’s the plural of anestrus, a period of sexual dormancy) but it’s (among) the most likely (by probability) 7-letter word played in tournament Scrabble games — there’s something like 9 anagrams of ANESTRI.

Yes it’s certainly not a trivial problem. Assuming the requirement for a digital component in order to compute word scores, perhaps frequency could be weighted by previous (competition?) word plays.

Keeping a rolling social history via some sort of merge-friendly approximate frequency data-structure (e.g., count-min sketch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch ) would allow you to score the game dynamically based on the play history of the current players, their friends, or others with similar or different characteristics (e.g., "We're playing Brooklyn Scrabble now!").

That would just reward people who spend years memorizing entire dictionaries. Scrabble is already too skewed in favor of the elite players, IMO.

As paulcole says about chess, "the better player nearly always wins," and that's a problem when the only way to win is to turn the game into an obsession or a career. A big part of Wordle's appeal is that a reasonable vocabulary, and not a savant-level one, is all you need to bring to the table.

Yep, in fact in 2015 Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble World Championship without speaking any French.

There’s a bunch of Thai guys who crush at North American English Scrabble.

Fascinating. Although I can program I’ve basically ended up as someone who can do fairly in-depth technical writing among many other things. And I’m not generally a word puzzle fan.

I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living.

I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins.

Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned.

It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess.

Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’”

Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.

come back to tourney Scrabble! I see that we almost overlapped and played in the Phoenix nationals but different divisions. I was addicted until Feb 2020, then the pandemic started, so we made a site to let us play online tournaments (https://woogles.io)

Ha, yeah we definitely know some of the same people. I remember that Phoenix Biltmore being so expensive I shared a room with like 7 other 25-year old guys for the week. Was a really great time. Some of the after hours anagrams games blew my mind.

Eddie L. at the Portland club got me into distance running and that’s been my main hobby the past decade or so. I’ve gotten really into the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee, too.

I’ll check out the site!

I despise crosswords and love Wordle. to me they are completely different kinds of games. While a huge vocabulary helps with wordle, it's not required, especially since the answer dictionary itself is mostly common words.

"reasonable perceived effort" or maybe "reasonable perceived smarts". I think wordle fools us into thinking we're smart. Even though on some level we know it cannot take genius, it _feels_ like we've done something really clever, against the odds, when when we whittle down the possibilities to one word after just few guesses. It's counter-intuitive how quickly we solve it. Reminds me of the birthday paradox.

> How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words?

The NYT Crossword Minis is actually really popular within my friend group. It's usually about 8-10 words.

Actually, it’s 5x5 (typically). So five letter words again, just like Wordle. Again, likely not a coincidence.

Whilst solvable, there's still a skill differential in the scoreboard. So in group-chats, everyone "solves" it, but the person who does it in 2 gets to celebrate (but a chunk of it is luck so it rotates a bit).

The relationship of wordle to cheating is underrated. The fact that it’s so astoundingly easy to cheat (the daily word is global), and falsify your game board (just text) makes dishonesty completely undesirable. If you post 1/1, people will assume you hit the once-a-year lucky first guess, or that you’re cheating. There are no high scores, no leaderboards, no reason other than personal satisfaction to work through the puzzle.

I'm more talking that if you're stuck, it's extremely easy to go to a generic online dictionary and enter some parameters and get to see some options. So you can still be playing a strategy but just not come up with a potential word yourself. It's not about going on social media with your hole in one.

>4. It lends itself to what I'll casual cheating, i.e. there are easy ways to get some hints without giving the answers away while focusing on a strategy.

I like this part. I’m in a 5-person group text where we’re posting our scores every day. Sometimes I’m the first, oftentimes not. When I happen to see a couple of others’ results in the thread, I’ll start to think about what they would have guessed with whatever pattern they posted. Like if I see ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ _ ⬛ , and I’m struggling between guessing "CHART" or "CHANT", I’ll go with CHANT because I assume they went with CHART first.

Along those lines, here's a data analysis pipeline someone put together to guess the current Wordle word based solely on the patterns of guesses in tweets:

https://www.kaggle.com/benhamner/wordle-1-6

This is even worse (depending on how much you mind cheating, hah) when you know the other person's usual "starting words".

> 3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words.

I guess it depends on one's vocabulary, but for non-native speaker it sure does have some obscure words and more importantly technical terms. For example TRUSS. While not exactly an "obscure" word, unless one has familiarity with technical construction terminology non-native speaker most probably is not familiar with such a word. It is just not a word one would expect to appear in a fiction book, film or casual conversation.

On #1 - humph was hard for me, I've never encountered it in my reading (maybe I'm not reading a particular genre that uses it? Is it something Jane Austen used?), only got it via a a last ditch guess, because I'm familiar with "harrumph" and I had "-umph" already and "h" was the only prefix that remotely made any kind of sense.

The wordlist definitely isn't perfect, and obviously each person has their own vocabulary, but it still is a key. It's something the creator mentions, if on your first play you run into a stupid word, you probably won't come back the next day. And the fact that the current word list is 1/th the total word count goes to show how many words are ridiculous.

AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and categorized all of them into 3-4 buckets, which is what lead to the final 2.5k answer list.

That's interesting, I suspect a lot of Wordle's success derives from their curation of words to remove things like "abaft" and "imago".

But then I see the NYT went and removed words like "caulk" and "agora" because they were "obscure", and I feel better about humph.

caulk was the word last week though? Nobody I play the game with knew that word. Granted we are not native english speakers. Too hard word every now and then is also unifying experience when everybody stops hating the player and instead hates the game.

Fair point. Caulk might also be more of a British English word than American English word.

I'm not sure about that, given it was used in New Girl, a Fox tv series. The comments thanking new girl for how the solver knew the word was such a refreshing change from "omg NYT ruined it"

...I also learned it was used in that classic millennial childhood game Oregon Trail (because you can caulk the wagon to cross the river)

It's a common word as far as I, an American, knew. But then again my dad was handy around the house and we always had tubes of caulking around.

I saw that there was some grumbling on social media about 'caulk' when it came up - 'how was I supposed to know that word?' etc. Saddened me - you don't need to be a builder or DIY expert to have a vocabulary that includes such terms. It's a modern phenomenon - if a person is shown to not know something they would rather complain about elitism than learn or expand their knowledge.

The NYT notably didn't add words to the list, but a surprising number of people complain they ruined it by adding "obscure" words like "tacit", "swill" and "caulk".

Tbh I can understand never encountering caulk and swill somehow because never did diy or indulge in pig farming or fantasy, but I kinda would have expected "tacit acceptance" to be a common enough phrase if one reads newspapers...

In my country, "swill" is more associated with drinking alcohol these days, due to a misguided attempt at moderating drinking: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/the-six-oclock-swill-begins

Now that I've looked it up I'm "Oh sure." I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought of it as a dictionary word or something you would write outside of dialog however.

#3 -- agree, the word list is also really nice. A bunch of plurals or conjugated verbs would really bring down the experience. But that would have been easy to overlook.

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