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Comment by drorco | Hacker News Reader

I think this won't work so well in Hebrew. As an example, SPOILER ALERT, Today's word starts in ב, and when I try to think of words starting in ב, I'm constantly thinking of words where "ב" acts as the "in-" prefix for a word. I think in English this never happens as unlike Hebrew, I can't think of a letter than can act as a meaningful prefix.

*SPOILER for today's Wordle* *** *** Eventually, today's word is בהחלט in which ב can be considered as a prefix since ב-החלט -- "in decisiveness". ** ** *****

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"I think in English this never happens as unlike Hebrew, I can't think of a letter than can act as a meaningful prefix."

a on its own can be a few different prefixes: https://www.etymonline.com/word/a-?ref=etymonline_crossrefer... Many of the examples cited in that will strike a modern English speaker as simply being the word, such as "amethyst" which was news to me, but we have moral -> amoral, sexual -> asexual, and a few others.

I certainly agree I've never thought of this in the context of a word game, as opposed to the s suffix which is almost mandatory in Boggle, for instance.

True. "A" does play a similar role. The thing with "A" is that there are relatively few words where it could be applied, while in Hebrew, almost every noun and verb I can think of can have a "ב" prefix.

I agree totally. I saw this more as an interesting "natural" word trivia challenge than any disagreement on my part.

Well, I always think of five letter plurals that end in S, even when I know there is no S in that position.

True, but in English I think this is more of a suffix thing, for example you can have words like "soft"->"softly", "poll->polls". I think this effect is much more subtle when this happens with a suffix rather than a prefix.

Are we playing a different game? By me the word starts with a "מ"

Interesting. My gf gave it a go after I did and she like you got a word starting with מ.

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