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A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words

submitted by cyanba+(OP) on 2026-02-01 17:54:55 | 133 points 138 comments
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9. Anothe+Bi[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-01 20:29:01
>>znkynz+9h
I recommend anything at https://www.merriam-webster.com/games for these sorts of games. Lots of wordle variations and all add free.
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15. doblad+2n[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-01 21:04:42
>>znkynz+9h
My favorite right now is https://tiledwords.com/, not affiliated to it in any way, I just enjoy it.
21. pseudo+Lu[view] [source] 2026-02-01 22:03:14
>>cyanba+(OP)
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.

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27. pseudo+Ix[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-01 22:24:32
>>hombre+Mf
The Wordle list is available here (in addition to many other places): https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-web-tools/blob/main/wordl...
30. huhten+sy[view] [source] 2026-02-01 22:29:58
>>cyanba+(OP)
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.

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54. thauma+MR[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-02 01:21:42
>>croisi+oy
Depends on your point of view.

The most direct thing we can say is "no, because there is no such word as valew". It's not in Merriam-Webster, it's not in Samuel Johnson's 18th-century dictionary, it's not in the Collins dictionary (for British English).

It is in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is noted as a "[spelling] variant of value" from the 14th century. It has never been a word with any other meaning than that of value, and using it now would be a pure error if someone used it, which obviously nobody will ever do. Accepting it in Wordle makes as much sense as accepting vvest on the theory that that was an acceptable spelling of west in the past.

There is an etymological connection between Portuguese valeu and English value, in that they both descend from Latin valeo, but value has no sense of gratitude or satisfaction. (I'm guessing the blog author was misled by https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valew#Portuguese , which says that valew is Portuguese internet slang for valeu.)

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57. rhplus+LS[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-02 01:29:50
>>gretch+lA
EPEE is a common fill word from a lexicon informally known as crosswordese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosswordese

Really no harder than memorizing all the 2 and 3 letter words in Scrabble and many players will pick most up in a few months.

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58. timeno+9U[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-02 01:41:49
>>huhten+sy
Hopefully this is an ok place to plug my own word game, https://spellrush.com/. It's very different from Wordle but that was a conscious decision since there are so many clones out there these days. Really wanted to put a fresh spin on word games.
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89. bmalic+ir1[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-02 07:41:06
>>huhten+sy
That's cool to see. I made a mobile game, Downwordly, that has the same mechanic in its puzzle mode. It came out almost five years ago and still has a decent set of versus players.

I'm more proud of a later word game that you can play free at https://wellwordgame.com/en If you give it a try, let me know what you think!

93. thxg+Ov1[view] [source] 2026-02-02 08:30:17
>>cyanba+(OP)
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...

96. oliwar+Xw1[view] [source] 2026-02-02 08:43:46
>>cyanba+(OP)
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 :)

111. wheyba+mM1[view] [source] 2026-02-02 11:27:00
>>cyanba+(OP)
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

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124. seanhu+Ea3[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-02 19:28:21
>>zarzav+bU
The oxford english dictionary disagrees with you.

https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=ooh

"Ooh" is most certainly a word. As is both "Ah" and "Aah" https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ah_int?tab=factsheet#8068455

https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=aah

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