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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

While the idiocy of removing words is beyond me, I am curious about agora. What's wrong with that word?

(I am a French, non native speaker of English)

My guess is that they deemed it a little bit too obscure, but I don't know that and can't imagine the process used and there are probably plenty of words in the list to point at and quibble over.

One of the things about Wordle is that it can give you a good shot at a feeling of success. Having something that feels like an "obscure" word which causes you to fail, lessens that positive feeling that could keep players returning every day.

The list of possible solution words is different from the list of words you can input as a guess. “Agora” and “slave” were removed from the input list (they’re back now).

Do you know if they were also removed from the solutions list? My only guess is it was an internal communications problem, and words removed from the solutions wordlist got removed in the guesses wordlist too.

The way wordle was coded, the solutions and guesses word lists were nonoverlapping. When you guessed a word it would check it against both lists. So when NYT removed words from the solutions list they should have added them to the guesses word list so they could still be guessed, but they didn't. An easy mistake to make with an unfamiliar codebase.

Aha, that makes perfect sense, thanks!

Some users may be agora-phobic

There don't seem to be any offensive uses for agora. Check the Urban Dictionary if there's ever a doubt. So that one might not have been pulled for PC reasons. Maybe they thought it was too archaic.

Well, a 3000 years old word is indeed quite archaic - but it is routinely taught in schools in France so that's the reason I may have not seen it as such. Good idea with the Urban Dictionary, thanks.

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