Resurrecting the old Wordle for procrastinators | Hacker News Reader

Resurrecting the old Wordle for procrastinators

leancrew.com

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The new Wordle has a shorter word list (down from about 12k to about 10k valid guess words).

EDIT: both lists are about the same length (12k); a small number of words were removed.

It is shorter, but only by 19 removed words and 6 removed answers. Compare for yourself:

https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/main.bd4cb59c.js

https://web.archive.org/web/20220210034340id_/https://www.po...

Oh, hmm. Perhaps the list has been changed multiple times? It was originally 12972 words (see https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/) and was 10638 words as of yesterday. Anyway, some of the words that have been removed are slurs/profanity.

I believe you're mixing it up. There are two arrays of words in the source code. One that contains all the solutions in order, and one that contains all the possible words without repeating any words in the solutions list

So the 10638 words are the set of all possible guesses minus the set of all the solutions.

Oh… I think you’re right. Thanks.

The one you linked also describes the old word lists similarly: https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle/#variant-cheat-mode

It allowed cunts as a guess today :p

There's a bit of confusion here because there's actually 2 word lists. There's a list of ~2,300 words that are ACTUAL words that will some day be the word of the day and there's a list of 12k POSSIBLE words you can enter in

I think OP is correct about them removing ~2k of the possible words

The “possible” words are added to the “answer” words to get the full list of guessable words, which is still around 12k just like it always was.

What's an example of a word that was removed? Any pattern there?

The day they moved to the NYT they removed words that could refer to the female anatomy (like "pussy"), as well as words referring to certain unpleasant concepts (e.g. slavery). They retained words referring to male genitalia (like "boner"). Make of that what you will.

They removed them from the allowed guesses list, or the possible answers list? I might be convinced about removing them from the possible answers, but the allowed guesses should be basically all possible English 5-letter words. Even if they make some argument about kids typing rude words in a classroom activity, well, kids are going to do that anyway...

Removed from the allowed guesses. If you guess "slave" and hit enter you'll receive an error.

I suppose they're both vulgar, but one difference is that "pussy" has a derogatory use that "boner" doesn't have.

Perhaps, but it also has an entirely innocent use that boner doesn’t. At least here in the UK it’s pretty common to use “pussy” to refer to a cat.

Pussy and boner both have innocent uses. A pussy is a cat, a boner is a silly mistake.

It seems inconsistent that dick (which can refer to a penis, a jerk, or a Richard) is still allowed, if they're worried about derogatory meanings.

Quick edit: DICKS is allowed, DICK is only 4 letters

My wife was returning something from the store Dicks. She needed the receipt and knew it had been emailed to me. A quick check and I didn’t see any such email.

So in all seriousness, while I’m at work on a open floor plain facing computer she asked me to search my spam folder for Dicks.

They notably did not remove CUNTS.

"Boner" can also mean a tremendous mistake -- negative connotation, but neither a slur nor a genitalia reference.

Which makes it distinct from a pussycat how?

The game has two lists -- one list that includes 'valid guesses' (things you can enter), and one that is a list of things that could actually end up as the solution.

From the possible solutions list, they removed words that have negative associations -- stuff like "slave."

From the guesses list, they mostly removed things like slurs.

What's the game's reason for having two lists instead of just one?

A lot of valid 5-letter words are so obscure as to make the game not fun when you inevitably lose.

If the answer to a day's Wordle was QIBLA or AALII or RAHUI, I'd probably stop playing.

Here's the full list of valid guesses. There are a lot of words here that most people don't know.

https://gist.github.com/cfreshman/cdcdf777450c5b5301e439061d...

At least in the first version of the game, the 'solutions' list was actually just a sequential list of what the answer would be for each given day. So, calling them 'possible solutions' on my part was actually a little misleading (sorry), there's no probability going on or anything like that. Not sure if NYT changed it.

The value is that we all get the same answer, so which makes it more fun to compare our results (this does mean that you can just cheat and look up the answer, and it might have been possible to obscure the list somehow, but probably getting into an escalating war with cheaters was not a priority for such a simple little free game).

I assume the logic is that they shouldn't have "unusual" words as answers but shouldn't gatekeep too much about what words you enter as that would be frustrating.

https://boingboing.net/2022/02/11/pussy-pupal-and-agora-amon... "Lynch", "slave", a series of racial slurs, etc.

A previous post here has the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30294688

I think you're technically correct originally. They only removed less than two dozen from the ACTUAL word list but they did in fact remove ~2k from the list of possible words you can enter in (which is the list most players interact with)

Do you know of any rehosts of the old Wordle code?

I made a copy the day The New York Times bought Wordle: https://buchh.fun/wordle

Thanks to Josh for making Wordle with a free license.

Hmm. The #241 word was changed between original and NYT, and I just played your copy and it was using the NYT word instead of Josh's. I don't want to spoil the 2 words here so here's a link to Mashable that covers the two different words to the same puzzle number. https://mashable.com/article/wordle-241-glitch-answer

I checked the other commenter's rehost and it also used NYT's word. So does this mean all supposed "rehosts" don't and can't work if the word list still defaults to NYT's?

Nevermind, the Mashable article misreported what happened. NYT didn't replace Agora with Aroma, they removed Agora and Aroma was simply the next one in line. My apologies, your rehost is fine.

Original: #241 agora, #242 aroma, #243 caulk, #244 shake

NYT list: #241 aroma, #242 caulk, #243 shake, #244 <not out yet>

Because I got Aroma instead of Agora on your rehost and didn't check the puzzle number, and because I took Mashable's word that Aroma was a replacement for Agora, I mistakenly thought your rehost was using NYT's word list.

It could still be improved. e.g., guessing right on the first word should evoke "lucky", not "genius".

Did the original Wordle have a free license? I don't recall seeing license information anywhere.

It's still there in the JavaScript file.

> Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.

It appears to be the Zero-Clause BSD, but for some reason, it says Microsoft holds the copyright. Could original author must have used something with the same license to write Wordle? If it isn't a free license and I am misinterpreting the code, I would be happy to take my version down.

https://dazzlepod.com/wordle/

https://wordle.nyc/

Why?

We can only guess, but perhaps they've applied some sort of commonality filter and dropped words that are rarely used? Or perhaps they've simply moved more words from the guess list into the challenge list? (the challenge list was produced from what words one person immediately recognised, after all)

Or, most likely IMO, they were not 100% certain they could legally use the existing word list (now, or for what they plan for the future) or were certain they couldn't without paying for some sort of license, so they produced a new list from scratch from a source they have licensed for their other word games.

There are two lists: guesses you are allowed to make, and possible solutions from the puzzle. From the solutions list they removed some words that had different British and American spellings, as well as some words with negative associations, like "slave."

From the possible guesses list, the words removed appeared to mostly be quite offensive slurs.

Ah, good. The Americanisms did my nut in. 5 thumbs up.

* Americanizmz

Easier still, try one of the alternatives like Wordii:

https://frequal.com/wordii

Bonus features: * Streak stats to share * Try new words faster

So it just told me that SPANKS, BALLS, and TEAMS are all not in the dictionary. What are the rules for this one?

Not sure, but all three examples you listed are plural. Maybe they didn't include such variants?

That was it! Not sure how I didn’t notice that.

Also think I might like that. Thanks.

I like this one! Clean and minimalist. Did you make it?

Shameless self-plug, but if anyone is interested in alternatives with an added challenge, I made https://squareword.org where you guess words to uncover a word square of 5x5 letters. Feedback has been positive and looks like user numbers are picking up, doubling about once per week so far.

Yes, this is a ground-up implementation using TeaVM and the Flavour toolkit.

TeaVM: https://teavm.org/

Flavour: https://teavm.org/docs/flavour/templates.html

I love the idea, but on my iPhone SE the 5x5 square overlaps with the keyboard, making it hard to play.

Hey! Glad you like it. I made an update now that I think should fix this.

there are many many words missing from its guess dictionary

laser lakes

to name a couple

Here's an amazing list of other wordles:

https://rwmpelstilzchen.gitlab.io/wordles/

The hard part of of the article is getting the history file from Local Storage. If you don't care about that then it's much easier.

SHREK IS NOT IN THE DICTIONARY

I don't know what has changed about the game, but running it in my phone (Pixel 4, Firefox mobile) has become near impossible.

Every other action freezes the entire page while some event gets processed. And by event I mean like "clicked the 'L' button", the most basic actions in the game.

I guess I'll just stick with the alternatives from now on.

It was fine for me but today or yesterday it reset everyone's "hard mode" setting in my group, and today it was glitching like crazy on my wife's phone.

Amazing how quickly they managed to make it worse.

I copied the index.html and main.js file, threw them on GitHub Pages, and shared it with a few friends. It's an easy and cheap way to keep it old school.

Will the answers from the new and old versions start diverging at some point? i.e. will the share link need to specify which version your pictographs are referring to (though I'd imagine NYT would add some branding/advertising to their share link before link)

NYT version of the game doesn't load for me on Firefox for Android unless I disable uBlock Origin. Anyone else have this problem?

I have cookies blocked from nyt and it crashes on load when it fails to set a cookie, resulting in a white screen.

No, works ok for me on Android/ Firefox / unlock. Hth.

I recently made a cli version of Wordle. So I can play indefinitely: https://github.com/jakesco/wordle-hs

This is interesting info, but...what paywall? The old URL https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ still goes directly to the puzzle (redirecting to nytimes.com).

Well it already has a modal cookie popup so the experience has degraded right away. Sure, it is not _that bad_, but the trend is clear.

The redirect target has some obnoxious stuff like a cookie banner as well as outright malware like Google Tag Manager (which will no doubt load further malware if it is allowed to load itself).

The article is talking about "the inevitable New York Times paywall", not one right now

The article also mentions this:

> February 10 was the last day Wordle was still available at its old site.

Which doesn't appear to be the case, it is still accessible at the powerlanguage address.

No it isn't. The powerlanguage address [1] redirects to the New York Times's version [2].

[1] https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

Picking at nits I know, but it is available via that site, not at it.

And via a cookie wall. From a quick scan of NYT's policy I got the impression clicking "reject" might only reject their direct tracking not that of 3rd parties, though I didn't have time to look in detail first time I was redirected, and I've not yet found the right combination of free time and inclination to nip back since, so I could have come to the wrong conclusion there.

That URL currently redirects to the NYT version of the game, although it's possible that browsers may continue to cache and display a previously-requested version of the page contents (avoiding a redirect, at least while the cache remains valid).

That's what I've got on my phone, hasn't redirected to new york times and still running the version on powerlanguage

The future appears to be unevenly distributed. Some get redirected some don’t.

Several people were redirected to the NYT version before I was, as discussed in my Wordle group. I suspect they did this as a gradual transition to validate the migration. I wasn’t redirected until yesterday.

I keep seeing that but I’d be amazed if NYT paywalled it. They’ll just add derivative versions and stuff like that for subscribers. Much like how their daily mini crossword is free to all.

When the NYT announced the purchase, they said Wordle would "initially" remain free to play.

If I told you that tonight I will "initially" be watching Evil Dead II, you're going to have some questions about what I'm doing afterward.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-t...

I'd be amazed as well, they're far better off using it to promote themselves and try to bait you to try/look at other things. Paywalling it would just remove most of those daily users they just bought. Maybe when it dies off, then they will do that, but quite likely most people will use one of the many clones, especially the apps. The fad will die off really quick I'm thinking. To me it doesn't have the lasting power of things like sudoku.

So where does the "procrastination" come in?

Not saving the original HTML and JavaScript before the redirect was established.

Note that as of now there is no paywall, going to the old URL forwards to the new URL and game history is kept (my streak is 38 days now), and the small number of removed words doesn't affect gameplay. Perhaps it makes sense for addicts to grab the original version just in case the NYT eventually restricts access, but so far they haven't.

I lost my history at the change over. Not sure why. But my streak wasn't much to speak of because of the whole light/eight/fight/might/night/right/sight/tight/etc. fiasco on January 31.

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