If I remember correctly, the original version of wordle used a word list that was run past the creator's wife, who had learned English later in life. The result was a really accessible game - none of the words felt like ones you wouldn't know. It probably makes sense to reuse words than risk losing that accessibility.

(I kept a copy of original wordle, and it seems to have 2,315 words that are possible answers.)

The original Wordle came with a pre-baked ordered list of 2315 "secret" words, off which the daily secret word was looked up (I think based on local time). The list was right there in the javascript code of the game (alongside the list of 12972 allowed guess words). It covered dates from 2021-06-19 to 2027-10-20.

Then in January 2022, the NYT bought Wordle, and started tweaking both lists, first shrinking the secret word list to 2309 entries, but leaving the logic otherwise intact. Fast forward to today, I looked up the current code [1], and it seems that there are now 14855 allowed words. The first 12546 are ordered alphabetically (0: "aahed", 12545: "zymic"), and the next 2309 are not. This may suggest that the latter are the secret words, but the logic for picking them has changed: I found no obvious sequence, when compared to the last few days' secret words. So it's either a more complex sequence, or the secret word is picked server-side.

In any case, I guess they decided to re-shuffle the list now at day 1689 / 2309 in order to avoid giving particularly assiduous player an additional bit of information: they can exclude all previous secret words. (To be accurate, I think this would be 1.897 bits, but my information theory is rusty.)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/games-assets/v2/9003.896ec900f2a1ce8...

1. Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed".

2. Only a tiny group of people care to "card count" Wordle to rule out words that have already been played because they think that sort of min/maxing is fun. Most people don't even think about that, so whether Wordle reuses words every few years is trivial to them.

"Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this. And the "wordle community" is a drop in the bucket of regular players, and not remotely representative.

I did have a similar reaction personally to the "exciting news" framing but I'm not actually sure it's wrong. The original list of words was an excellent list, and it's been over 4 years.

It seems about right. They reshuffled the deck about three-quarters of the way through (1689 ÷ 2315 = 72.9%). Blackjack shoes are typically shuffled around the same point. Different games, but similar considerations in this respect.

For my game redactle.net, I blacklist the Wikipedia article for 2 years. I figure there is a tradeoff between novelty and allowing the pool of articles to shrink. The Wikipedia vital level 4 category has 10k articles and probably half of them actually meet the criteria (length, number of languages etc) for making the cut.

As someone who recently built a daily word game[1], I 100% get it. I can say from first hand experience: there's an awful lot of words that are totally valid but not fun.

I spent approximately as much time on building the word list as I did developing the game. The author's technique of just grabbing a word list and spellchecking it is completely not sufficient, you will get so many weird unfamiliar words in there. In the end I was able to whittle down my list to about 24,000 using various automatic methods, but from that point I just had to do a manual review on the remaining list, which meant I got to see a lot of words, and many of them felt very obscure and/or not fun.

1: shameless plug: https://wheybags.com/turntiles

I am guessing a high percentage of wordle players prefer a wordle version which uses common words, and New York Times would prefer cater to those, rather than a smaller group of enthusiasts.

Seems like a good post to plug a recent find and my new favourite -

https://puzzlist.com/stackdown

It's from the person who made https://wafflegame.net if you are familiar with it, one of many that came on the tails of the original Wordle.

In comparison, the Stackdown is less rushed and way more rewarding when solved. Also, more interesting in structure.

I've been waiting years for my word to be my first guess and still nothing... it's been my opener for years. I know my word hasn't been used as I've checked the list of used words.

So for me, reusing words is not what I want to hear.

I've used my own tool (https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/wordle-solver/) for understanding how many words are left after each guess. It'll show hints if you want them too, but they are disabled by default. I like understanding how my guesses reduce the word space well (or not).

It uses the list of all of the words that can be in Wordle, and there are so many words I can't imagine anyone guessing. And I come from a family with large vocabularies.

They just need more bits of entropy - going from IPv4 to IPv6 involved quadrupling it, but this transition is much more minor. They could just go to 6 characters for now, and go to 7 later.

In https://squareword.org (2D variant) I was also running into this problem. It's a bit different though, since I need to find valid 5x5 squares, with 5 words down and 5 across. Surprisingly, there is quite a limited number of such squares.

Ive been able to solve it by slowly injecting more challenging words over time, which has the side effect of also introducing a difficulty gradient. Players seem happy so far :)

My friend and I labored over the word lists for our word game subletters.fun. We wanted the word pairs and at least one optimal path for each word pair to be from words on one list, which were simpler words that we would expect everyone to be familiar with. But players could use their own more advanced vocabulary to solve the puzzles on their own without feeling restricted. Then we bundled literally 10 years of unique word pairs into the game and shipped it.

The analysis misses a point. Wordle uses two lists of five letter words: words that are in the dictionary, and can be used in a guess; and those that can be used as the daily secret word. The latter list is smaller, and sticks to more common words. Wordle has been around for 1550 days, so they have used 67% of the possible words. In another couple of years, they have to either start using uncommon words, or recycle. There's no rush, so it's unclear why this is happening now.

At the risk of being accused of obscurantism, I would like to know more of the words on the 5-letter list that are excluded by Microsoft Word.

> So that does beg the question:

Since we're being pedantic about words here, it would be better to say that it "raises the question" or "prompts the question"!

This is lame. The original creator of Wordle would’ve been more Spiny.

If anyone's looking for new word games, I built The Daily Baffle which might appeal to some of you. Check it out at dailybaffle.com!

I start with the same word every day. I hate to change it, because I want the joy of getting the wordle in 1 someday.

Why not add a character (for fun?) The weekend game can be 6 characters and the regular one 5 characters?

I'm surprised they weren't reusing words already.

Obviously a finite resource will run out after a while.

Connections is better anyway.

is "valew" related to the Brazilian "valeu", expressing gratitude/satisfaction?

Every now and then I play quordle, octordle, and once a thousand-word variation (which breaks down gameplaywise to just getting every letter at every spot).

A bit of reuse of the same word in the one-word version can't hurt I think

Yet the current word list apparently doesn't include "Irish" (even though Welsh, Scots and Brits are all valid). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It doesn't beg the question, it raises it. Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which you assume the truth of your conclusion. It doesn't mean something "begs for the question to be asked."

I have no idea why this incorrect use of the term drives me so nuts; however, you'd think a blog post about English words and Wordle wouldn't make this mistake.