Until about a week or so ago, I really wasn’t concerned how many five-letter words there were in the English language. As it turns out, the number varies widely.
The Free Dictionary lists more than 158,000 words with five letters. The the Official Scrabble Dictionary (which allows some pretty obscure five-letter words), puts the number at about 9,000.
But if some reasonable people come up with some commonly used five-letter words – piano, ouija, knoll, to mention a few – the list will be around 2,500. And at one word a day, that list will last a little shy of seven years.
Five-letter words? One a day? By now you know the topic of today’s missive: Wordle, a guess-the-word online game. It’s simple and addictive. And the beauty of it is there’s only one game a day – the same word for all players. Solve one, wait until midnight for a new game.
It starts with five empty blocks across – one for each letter – stacked six rows deep, one row for each guess. Guess the first word. If it’s the right letter in the right place, it will show up green. If it’s the right letter, but the wrong location in the word, it will be yellow. If the letter isn’t in the word, it will show up in black. A keyboard-like arraignment of 26 letters shows letters guessed and those remaining.
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Wordle is free. There are no pop-up ads. No upgrades to buy. There is no app. The is no download. There is nothing to register. There are no “in-app purchases.” It is available only on a website: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle.
It was developed by Josh Wardle, Brooklyn-based software engineer. His partner liked word games, so he created a guess-the-word game just for her. It being about words, and his last name being Wardle, he made its name a play on his.
It went online around Nov. 1, with 90 players. At the start of this month, there were 300,000 people playing it. The increase continues to be rocket-like.
He believes the game’s simplicity is part of its popularity. “I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun,” he told The New York Times a few weeks ago. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.”
And while he’s had some success with games in the past, he attributes the popularity of Wordle to limiting it to one word a day. It prohibits binging, which can lead to burn out.
The game keeps statistics on how many times you’ve played it, percentage won, and how many times you took one, two, three, four, five or six tries to solve the word. Those results can be shared with friends.
It’s not just guessing word after word, of course. One major tip: Start with a five-letter word containing three or more vowels: Piano and audio, for instance. Another tip: Use the keyboard below the layout to keep track of which letters have been used. There’s no sense in repeating a letter that’s not in the target word.
Wordle, said Wardle, “is something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day. And that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”
Sometimes, however, it’ll take several times more.
Wrong address for writing tablet
A recap of 2021’s favorite columns had an incorrect web address for the Blackboard Writing Tablet. Information on the tablet can be found at www.myboogieboard.com. It is also available for purchase there as well. In addition, it is available from Amazon and possibly big-box stores in the area.
Lonnie Brown can be reached at LedgerDatabase@aol.com.
