Comment by lossyalgo

2 days ago

That reminds me of one of the biggest IMO missing feature of Wordle: They never give a definition of the word after the game is finished! I usually do end up googling words I don't know (which is quite often) but I'm guessing I'm one of the few who goes to the trouble. I've even written to The New York Times a couple times to suggest adding a short definition at the end as I honestly feel like a ton of people could totally up their vocabulary game and it surely could be added with minimum effort (considering they even added a Discord multiplayer mode).

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lossyalgo

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Terr_  2 days ago

Is Wordle really the best vehicle for that, though? I mean, it tends towards a subset of 5-letters words the audience is more likely to know in advance, excluding a lot of the more-surprising words.

A "click to see more about why this answer fits" crossword, on the other hand...

  • lossyalgo  2 days ago

    How often have you played Wordle? I've played well over 1000 games, and at lesat 1/5th of those were words I had to look up. They seem to enjoy picking obscure words in order to make the game more challenging.

    • Terr_  2 days ago

      Perhaps the unusual outcomes are just more memorable, and so seem more frequent? Here's a representative sample of 30 that were used very recently.

          Shoal, Hasty, Lobby, Vogue, Gunky, 
    Sheep, Theft, Linen, Slime, Fluke, 
    Hydra, Dizzy, Lance, Shred, Buyer, 
    Attic, Guava, Awake, Stank, Hoist,
    Mogul, Squad, Roost, Skull, Bloom,
    Mooch, Surge, Vegan, Scene, Cello,

      None of those stand out as "WTF does that even mean", but maybe I'm the weird one if we adjust for age-demographics or book-reading.

      If I had to guess at a riskier 20%... Guava, a fruit some people may not have had; Gunky because it's slang; Mogul, Vogue, and Mooch were borrowed from other languages; Cello is something people may have heard more than read; Hoist.

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yellowapple  2 days ago

That's a brilliant idea and now that you've mentioned it it seems like a rather glaring omission.

  • lossyalgo  2 days ago

    Please write to the NY Times and suggest it! I still play and it still irks me when I have to go google a word.