zlacker

>>cyanba+(OP)
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.)

>>trotha+lg
It’s this. There are many five letter words that are not “wordley”. Words such as, idk, bokeh, are technically part of the lexicon but would never appear as a solution. The wordle bot will even tell you this if you guess them — “good guess, but unlikely to appear as a solution”. The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.

>>hyperb+3A
IMO scrabble would be improved by a similar limitation. There's too many nonsense words.

>>groggo+Q41
Scrabble is a competitive game, not a puzzle, and therefore subject to a different set of constraints. (Players in a competitive game are trying to win; a puzzle author, if they're any good at their job, is ultimately trying to lose.)

In particular, you have to consider the equilibrium. If you only allow a subset of words in Scrabble, this replaces the competitive advantage from knowing lots of words that no one uses in real life, with a competitive advantage from knowing the exact contours of the border between acceptable and unacceptable words. I would argue that this is even worse; at least if you learn lots of Scrabble words you're learning something about the real world.

By contrast, Wordle can self-impose whatever constraints they want on solutions, and people don't have to know what those constraints are in order to solve the puzzle. (It can help a little on the margin, which in a perfect world would not be the case, but it's much less of a problem for the puzzle-solving experience than the Scrabble equivalent would be.)

>>amelia+w81
Ya that's a good point for competitive scrabble. However today I think a lot of people's main exposure to Scrabble comes from WordsWithFriends (and recently, the new NYT games version). In those games, there's no penalty for getting a wrong word, it just won't let you play it. In that context, I at least think it would be nice to have a setting with a more limited list... it could be like Chess timed variants.

It's obviously an impossible challenge to draw those contours in language. Wordle did pretty well though! And going the other direction, just allowing everything that could possibly a word, just starts getting ridiculous.