Spelling games, from Wordle to ‘Wheel of Fortune’
Hangman inspired "Wheel of Fortune." And now, our language columnist writes, we have Wordle, perfectly built for the Twitter age.
Staff
A word game has been spreading across the Twitterverse: Wordle. The goal is to guess a five-letter word in six tries. It has a “Wheel of Fortune”-like grid that reveals whether or not the word contains the letters you’ve guessed. The boxes turn gray when letters aren’t in the word, yellow if they’re there but in the wrong place, and green if they are in the word in the correct order.
News articles speculate that the game is popular for several reasons: It’s simple and straightforward; it gives you a new word only once a day; everyone is working with the same word, so it’s fun to compare attempts; and when you’re done you can easily tweet out your gray, yellow, and green grid sans letters, showing people how you did without spoiling the puzzle for them.
It’s a more sophisticated version of Hangman, the spelling game that is still a popular way to fill those last five minutes of an elementary school class, and which inspired “Wheel of Fortune,” the highest-rated show in syndicated television for 26 years, according to Rohan Ahluwalia at the Paley Center for Media. In Hangman, one person chooses a word or phrase and the others try to guess it letter by letter. When someone picks a wrong letter, another body part is drawn on the stick person hanging on the gallows. Understandably, teachers have renamed it Tulip, Snowman, or Parachute, drawing or erasing parts on the respective figures as letters are guessed.
Some of the same strategies work for all these spelling games. It pays to guess the most common letters first. These vary depending on what source you are using – a count of letter frequency in Google Books, for example, gives the top 10 as ETAOINSRHL. According to Hangman enthusiast Nick Berry, however, you should really use a frequency table based on a dictionary, since Hangman is about individual words and Google Books favors letters in short common words such as the and to. His top 10 are ESIARNTOLC. Initial letters occur in a different order: SCPDRBAMTF. A good first guess on Wordle, then, might start with s or c and include lots of vowels.
Another avid Hangman player, Jon McLoone, created a program that worked out which words are the hardest to guess. The trickiest words are short – there’s a better chance you don’t make any correct guesses – and include lots of rare letters: jazz, faff, vex. If you prefer longer words, zigzagging and wheeziness are among the most difficult.
Another lovely thing about Wordle is that it’s not trying to stump you. The pleasure is in the solving, not, as with Hangman, in trying to trick or beat someone else. And, of course, in tweeting out your daily grid.