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Comment by liambigelow | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the examples, I'll note them. We did intentionally scale back from the classic wordgame dictionaries (looking at you, Scrabble) due to an overabundance of archaic words that the NPC can play against you — but it does push us into the unfortunate role of dictionary moderators!

I'd like to add a button to the dictionary to report words that should be included. For now, we erred on the side of a smaller dictionary since it's less jarring to add words than remove them :)

(stere / steres is especially regrettable, sorry!)

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El is just the name of L, yet it's cheaty due to how little use it gets.

Obtaining a good word list is hard, I have one saved which is a merging and editing of several freely available ones, including one used in Scrabble competitions and one from some Linux distro, and a few "basic word lists". There will be endless errors like missing plurals and past tenses, as well as the inclusion of things like acronyms that shouldn't be in there at all. And if you prune obscure words but allow the submission of missing words, I guess you'd better keep the list of pruned words around so you can head people off at the pass by pre-filtering their submissions.

Our current base list is the intersection of Wordnik's games wordlist and the SCOWL spellchecker — words in both are a definite yes, and SCOWL's capitalization helps us filter out acronyms and proper nouns.

We have done some manual massaging beyond that, but not much. Waiting for more feedback like this! You can see the current tranches of dictionary massaging here: https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/tree/main/dict_buil...

This seems to cry out for a separate project to try to standardize a "wordlist for word puzzle games that doesn't mostly cater to scrabble pedants" :)

One thing that might help would be for the winning word, and all the other words involved, to be shown somewhere upon a battle's resolution, along with their definition (or lack thereof).

That exists, it's under the [i] button at the top right.

Incidentally, some buttons don't work for me. This [i] button won't toggle back to off, and the buttons in the "edit board" function mostly don't work - including "stop editing board".

Thanks!

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