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.
I will say that having used the same starter word the whole time that has not come up yet, it's a little disappointing that it may now take even longer to appear.
You may want to swap out aahed if that's what you're rocking.
My favourite starter word has come and gone. So I’m in the opposite situation where I feel relieved to be able to go back to using it.
Have you checked it didn't come up before you started?
> 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"
The Times sure doesn't think that about the people who do Letter Boxed. One LB had "polymethylmethacrylate" in its dictionary.
I've saved the daily dictionaries from 2024-03-30 and that's the longest word out of the 93 393 total distinct words in the 674 dictionaries I've saved. They average 1199.47 words per dictionary.
They have some truly ridiculous words, such as "troughgeng". WTF is a troughgeng? Googling that gives a couple of pages in Chinese (or a similar looking language) and a Scottish dictionary entry for "Throu" which in one of the examples of "throu" as an adverb lists a bunch of phrases is it used in, including:
> (8) througang, throw-, throoging, trough-geng, -geong (Sh., Ork.), (i) a going over or through; a passage (I.Sc. 1972); specif. (ii) a narration, a recital (of a story); (iii) a full rotation of crops, a shift; (iv) a thoroughfare, lane, passageway, corridor open at either end (Sc. 1808 Jam.; Sh. 1908 Jak. (1928); Rxb. 1923 Watson W.-B.; Ork., w.Lth., wm.Sc. 1972). Also attrib.; (v) = (5); (vi) energy, drive (Bnff. 1866 Gregor D. Bnff. 192);
> people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed"
That isn't a correct diagnosis; people have heard of aahed. You'll find it naturally in the expression "[someone] oohed and aahed".
People don't want aahed, and their instinct that it shouldn't count is reasonable, but unfamiliarity isn't the problem with it.
Ooh and aah aren't words, they're sounds (onomatopoeia). A sound is just a sequence of letters used for their phonological values.
You can spell the sound "ah" however you like: ah, ahh, aah, aahh, there's no wrong way to spell it.
If you write "the washing machine tringged when it finished", 'tring' is not a word, even though it's following the rules of English morphology, you could have written any sequence of letters that most faithfully reproduces the sound of the washing machine. You could have written katrigged or puh-tringged.
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
That is false; the fact that you can conjugate aah (or tring) into the past tense is sufficient to prove it's a word.
Ooh and aah most certainly are words. Is meow not a word? Can I spell it miough and sit smugly correct?
It's true that onomatopoeia isn't always a word, but in the particular case of "aah", I think that particular choice of letters is conventionalized enough that it is a word.
The Wordle list is available here (in addition to many other places): https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-web-tools/blob/main/wordl...
Has anyone confirmed if they still use only this original list? I would think the NY Times could change the word list however they choose.
They changed some words pretty much right after the acquisition. There was some controversy when they started doing "themed" words (like Christmas stuff in December) vs more "random" words. Some words were also removed for having negative vibes/political liability
They removed WENCH from the list of upcoming solutions fairly quickly, but forgot to add it back to the list of available words so you couldn't use it as a guess for a little while. It made it back to the list eventually.
I believe these lists are more like what is described in the blog post. Diction of words, filtered to 5 letter words, no plurals, etc. It most likely has 99%+ of the words, but maybe some they don't actually use in Wordle.