I would guess they simply applied their existing word game dictionary — probably the same one they use for “Spelling Bee”.
It doesn’t include slurs, uses US-spellings (at least in the US), and intentionally doesn’t include “obscure” words, though obviously that’s a judgement call. (Spelling Bee has an email link if you want to dispute an exclusion — I believe I helped get “ichor” added to the list.)
Fibre could be because it might annoy American players who object to non-American English spellings.
Pupal and agora I really don't get. Maybe some uneducated players would think pupal was some dirty word (related to poop???), but agora has no negative association that I can imagine.
As for the other removed words, I think it's fortunate for the Wardle guy that that list was not publicized before it got bought. That would have created a firestorm and possibly eliminated his chance of the sale.
> As for the other removed words, I think it's fortunate for the Wardle guy that that list was not publicized before it got bought. That would have created a firestorm and possibly eliminated his chance of the sale.
The word lists were (and are) in the site's javascript, readable for anyone who cares to look.
Though, I'd expect these to be moved to allowed guesses, there's some very obscure stuff in the allowed guess list.
Probably just a first pass by whoever's in charge of standards. Now I'm trying to guess if this was a simple pass with an "approved words" list, or if there was a mind-numbing meeting where they spent a day or two looking at words.
As someone from British English nation, there's no way I'm ever likely to guess FIBER unless I've exhausted FIBRE first. It breaks the brain. The ER phenomenon goes against every fibre of my being.
Also from a Commonwealth nation and I prefer the -er spelling. It looks more balanced, take the word center as an example, it plain looks nicer, and having a vowel flow onto a consonant for a hard ending means the spelling matches the actual pronunciation. I think centre at first glance would suggest a more French pronunciation - "cen-tray".
That said, I'll never forgive American English for what it did to Aluminium. The word Aluminium just sparkles and glitters like the metal itself, whereas Aluminum has a distinctly cold sound, like an echo in an empty hall early on a winter's morning.
As a Canadian I have a weird mishmash that looks right to me. I'd actually use both center and centre in different contexts. Like, the center of a circle is clearly center, but a rec centre looks better that way! (Notwithstanding the red underline my browser with its own preference is giving me...)
I don't really see the motivation for removing slurs, etc, from the available guess list in a game where you are the only one who sees your guesses. Good of them to take the words with unpleasant associations out of the solutions list, though.
The Wall Street Journal's puzzles are edited by Mike Shenk. For years - going back to when he was in college - he published puzzles under the name "Marie Kelly" (an anagram of "REALLY MIKE"). Then, one day, the people at crosswordfiend.com decided that was unacceptable - that potential female crossword designers would be put off by the fact that a man was publishing crosswords under a woman's name. And, obviously, we need more female crossword designers. As well as more female answers to crossword clues. And don't even think about publishing a crossword that has, say, FASCIST as an answer - they don't want to see such an awful word.
A lot of this game is yet to be solved- it would be rather unfortunate if one of the most useful words in a top strategy happened to be a slur, meaning that those wishing to "solve" the game would likely have to include said slur in their strategy.
None of them look great, intuitively. Actually it is kind of interesting, although unsurprising on second thought, that the removed words skew toward these harsh g and k noises which don't show up as much elsewhere in English. So they don't look like good first picks. But maybe at some point strategies will advance to having common second picks or something like that.
I would be motivated to do it. If you were a happy wordle player and also have a marginalized identity, it might suck to finally get the word right and see a slur against that identity bouncing across the screen in happy green letters. Seems to me like this makes Wordle a more welcoming game.
Imagine this scenario, you open Wordle to guess the word for the day. You put in your guesses and manage to guess it right, but it's a slur that's been used against you on many occasions and now you have to relive traumatic episodes, when all you wanted was a positive experience?
The game has two word lists -- a "possible solution" set and an "allowed guess" set. They removed:
* some words with negative connotations from the solution set
* slurs from the allowed guess set
As such, I believe there already weren't any slurs in the possible solution set. Or at least they weren't in the group of words which were mentioned as removed here. So, your scenario was already not possible.
I think removing the words with negative connotations from the solution set was a great move because, while they aren't slurs, there's no need to give people that negative experience.
The wordle code has two distinct arrays: the list of answers and the list of other words you can guess. If you carelessly remove words from the answers you will also make it impossible to guess them. I figure they removed some answers without adding them to the acceptable guesses because they didn’t think about it.
Fibre, agora and pupal are a little esoteric. Not as much as many words on the SOWPODS list, but enough to perhaps be annoying.
wench, slave, fibre, agora, pupal, lynch
And removed the following from the list of words that are accepted as guesses (in addition to the above ones):
gooks, darky, pussy, spick, spics, bitch, fagot, dyked, coons, spiks, sluts, dykey, faggy, homos, chink, dykes, lesbo, kikes, whore
Most of those I get, but why did fibre, agora, and pupal get pulled?