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Comment by throwaway_ocr | Hacker News Reader

Pretty frustrating when you find a word, but it's not THE word. Pretty fun otherwise.

tbh this should accept all dictionary matches

Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?

I do have another version where it accepts ANY word but I found it quite unsatisfying when I survived by randomly spamming combinations and finding a really obscure word.

So am currently running it against a 20,000 word wordlist instead of my larger 300,000 wordlist

The third one in the archive wouldn't accept "tase" or "sate" for "seat".

300,000? The Oxford dictionary only contains 171,000!

I guess the wordlist with 300k contains all the different forms a word can have while the 171k count is only the base words.

Haha yeah the 300k list contains so really obscure stuff

Going two days back in the archive, "egret" not allowed

"braze" is a very common word, especially if you like bicycles.

Definitely not any less valid or unsatisfying than "zebra".

Ok yes all good examples. Have reverted back ot the large dictionary for now which accepts all these

I would argue it's less satisfying. I like bikes and I still had to look it up.

just tried that same archive puzzle and it accepted braze for me

the obvious solution is to not use the words that have an obscure word as anagram. I failed on 'target' because I went for 'regatta'.

That seems only fair. ;-)

> I failed on ‘target’ because I went for ‘regatta’.

Given that those two don’t have the same letters, isn’t that the expected outcome?

Haha oops, you're right :)

Why not just only allow a single try, but accept any "real" word?

Interesting idea but too many people mistype / mispell on first attempt (mostly me)

quite/quiet

Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?

EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.

I've built a some word games over the years (e.g., wordwhile.com, omiword.com), and one thing I've discovered is that players find it very unsatisfying when they enter a real, valid word and the game rejects it. I imagine that the timer would amplify that sense of unfairness.

Granted, there are also people who get annoyed when the game seems too accepting of unusual words, but if you can point them to a valid dictionary definition for that oddball word, they usually accept it without argument.

I'm one of those people who get annoyed if it's too loose. But I can just impose that restriction on myself and look down on people who rely on obscure words.

On today's puzzle, `WROGHT` was rejected, and I got `GROWTH` just in the nick of time.

Is that actually a word, or were you thinking of "wrought"?

The word is ‘wrought’, which is why it wasn’t accepted.

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