At 9:25pm on Thursday, the NYT’s Wordplay account tweeted that they were aware some players had their streak reset. The latest update came five hours later: Fingers crossed for your all-important streak, reader dear. While the NYT say that they haven’t changed the way you play Wordle, they might have changed something. Reddit poster “randybruder” says they compared the word lists (Wordle solutions are picked from a list you can see with a little technorummaging) and found the NYT’s version of Wordle is missing six words that were in the original. I’ve checked and yup, those are gone. One of those is likely removed because it’s spelled differently in American English and English English. This localisation situation previously caused controversy with the answers favor and humor, because who thinks to try nonexistent made-up dreamland words? Two of the others removed are slave and lynch and yeah, I sure can see why they’d wouldn’t want those as puzzle answers. Likewise, I understand why they might be wary of wench. But I can’t guess why they would have removed agora and pupal and I don’t want to Google alternate meanings to these words in case they turn out to be horrifying cyberfetishes previously unknown to me. Fan-made Wordle variants still using the original list will diverge from the official Wordle once the first of these comes up, which randybruder says will be on Tuesday. The Reddit poster also claimed that 19 words have been removed from the allowed guess list, most of them offensive or ethnic slurs. Yep I can understand removing those too. You can play Wordle on its new home on the NYT Games website, where it’s still free. Wordle has inspired a great many games taking some aspects of its grids and guesses in interesting new directions. Worldle has you guess countries from their silhouettes, Semantle is extremely difficult with no fixed word length, Sweardle uses cuss words, and Dungleon has you guess a dungeon composition. And that’s only a handful of ’em. Don’t worry: no spoilers here! I didn’t use today’s puzzle to create the header image ↑ up there, it’s from earlier this week.
