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Comment by ddejohn | Hacker News Reader

Very cool, thanks! I play every morning. There are times when Sam's curation is very frustrating. It would be nice to submit other valid words and have the game verify them as a way to score "bonus" points. Oftentimes I find that there are some baffling omissions and, after the fact, some truly bizarre inclusions. It would be nice to be able to score points based on your own vocabulary while still having the game's score based on whatever common denominator Sam comes up with.

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Agreed, I get frustrated a few days a week with curation inclusions and exclusions. DOORYARD, MICROMINI, NONCOM, ROMCOM are in the list and IMO shouldn't be. UNTENDED, MONOTONIC, BOLE are not in the list but IMO deserve to be.

As a nonnative speaker it's first time ever I've heard word "bole" being used

Agreed. When I type a good word that isn’t accepted, I usually just stop playing that days puzzle. My guess is that Sam is not very scientifically literate. Simple weather words like cyclonic or adiabatic, advection, no dice. And then you get some pretty obscure literary words.

Makes me want to make a free clone that includes science words, and isn’t afraid of the letter S.

I think your definition of "simple" doesn't agree with the average person's. I guarantee you that 98% of people don't know the word "adiabatic".

It’s a very common word in many technical domains. Not like it’s a guy’s name or something.

"It's a very common word in extremely niche domains" doesn't make something common, unfortunately.

It is also very culturally biased; some loanwords are more present than others

The omissions that kill me are common nautical terms.

And so many "non-American" words are rejected too like: whinge, colour, metre, etc.

"Whinge" is just a plain old misspelling of "Whine," nothing more or less. We don't need "Whinge" to become a word; we already have "Whine."

"Whinge" definitively is a word[1] and has existed since old English.

[1] https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=Whing...

Well, it shouldn't be. It's entirely redundant with 'whine'.

Where do you stand on "guarantee" vs "warranty"?

That's not to mention common phrases with a built-in redundancy such as "Cease and desist"? "Face mask"? "Free gift"?

Idiomatic English has lots of redundancies of one kind or another.

Those aren't really redundant, though. I can say, "I guarantee that this product will work," but nobody would say, "I warranty that this product will work." (You could argue that guarantee is redundant with warrant, but the police don't go to the judge to request a search guarantee. Both words are needed.)

I can't think of a single use case for whinge that wouldn't be equally satisfied by whine. Can you?

I can't think of a single use case for nought that wouldn't be equally satisfied by "zero". Or courgette that wouldn't be satisfied by zuchini, or both of those by "baby marrow". Or why use "oregano" when you could use "wild marjoram"? A perfectly good English name that has been largely displaced by an Italian word.

English (as all modern languages) has tons and tons of exact synonyms and other types of redundant words. It's just a normal part of usage.

In this specific case I personally prefer whinge for emphasizing the complaint and whine for emphasising the noise, so I don't really think they are redundant - I think they are slightly different.

No it isn't. What gave you that daft idea?

It's a stupid word, one that we don't need. 'Whine' works just fine. Why was it necessary to add a 'g'?

You can see 'whinge' gaining ground very recently at the expense of 'whine' here:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whine%2Cwhinge...

This is an outrage, and must be stopped. :-P

no homophones. whine shares a phonemic address with wine, while whinge staked out a plot of its very own, even if its just a slapdash pop-up tent next door to the local drunkard, binge. hinge shares a smartly bricked-up border with both.

It feels like they could just use something like the Google Ngram viewer to filter the words.

I’m still pissed about advection!

What does “isn’t afraid of the letter S” mean?

spelling bee puzzles never contain S. Originally they didn't include puzzles with e+d or i+n+g either.

I still remember my disappointment when I entered HEMOPHAGE and it was deemed "not a valid word".

naphtha and caracal.

And naphthalene, which would have been a pangram that day.

I seem to remember both those words were put forward in the hints page, too!

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