Wordle

[collect (null)]

Has anyone here compared the Dixonary five-letter words with the Wordle list of words at all? Just curious …

Dave

Sent from my iPad

[Shani Naylor]

I can't imagine there would be any overlap as the Wordle words are all very common. Its most uncommon word was PARER, which would surely have been DQ'd out of our game.

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[Paul Keating]

An interesting question. Shani suggested that any overlap would be slight, and her instincts turn out to be spot-on.

Wordle has 2,309 valid words, which is much the same order of magnitude as the entire Dixonary used-word list, which has a total of 3,785 words (of all lengths, from 1 letter to 30 letters) played in 3,443 rounds.

There are 619 5-letter words in the Dixonary used-word list. A quick look based on character-count might indicate two more, but ha-ha and X-man have hyphens in them, and of course Wordle doesn’t admit hyphens.

Of those 619 in the Dixonary used-word list, exactly 2 are valid in Wordle: anime (240) and cavil (2930).

Of those,

• anime was not offered with the sense that would most immediately come to my mind now, which the OED, in an entry written in 2003, defines as “A genre of Japanese … animated film or television entertainment…” The OED gives a first occurrence of that in 1985, which tends to confirm my notion that it would have been generally unfamiliar in 1991, when Round 240 was played. Instead, the dictionary definition, from RHD, was “an articulated cuirass of the 16th century, composed of horizontal lames joined by rivets and concealed thongs.”

• cavil was withdrawn in favour of a less-familiar word.

The remaining 617 are the sort of words that would have Wordle players protesting “but that isn’t a word!” – generally backed up by the lamentable assertion that was once (and maybe still is) taught in primary schools: “... because it’s not in the dictionary.”

But those are exactly the sort of words we like.

'collect (null)' via Dixonary wrote on 2024-04-22 20:24:

Has anyone here compared the Dixonary five-letter words with the Wordle list of words at all?  Just curious …

Dave

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Paul Keating
Soustons, Nouvelle Aquitaine, France