Puzzling US sports term is word of the year

A WORDLE solution that stumped British players has been crowned Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year.

Nearly 75,000 searches were made for “homer” after the baseball term appeared as an answer to the online word puzzle on May 5.

Editors said Wordle’s fiveletter answers dominated the most popular searches on the dictionary’s website.

The informal US term for a home run came top, with 95 per cent of searches for it made outside North America.

The American spelling of “humor” caused the second highest spike in the year.

Third was “caulk”, a term more familiar in American English than British, which means to fill the spaces around the edge of something, such as a bath or window frame, with a special substance. Americans, in turn, grumbled about “bloke”, which appeared on Wordle on July 25.

Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary publishing manager, said: “Wordle’s words, and the public’s reactions to them, illustrate how English speakers continue to be divided over differences between English language varieties, even when they’re playing a globally popular new word game that has brought people together online for friendly competition about language.

“The differences between British and American English are always of interest not just to learners of English but to English speakers globally, and word games are also perennially entertaining. We’ve seen those two phenomena converge in the public conversations about Wordle, and the way five-letter words have simply taken over the look-ups on the Cambridge Dictionary website.”

Wordle had millions of daily players after it took the world by storm early this year. The New York Times bought the web-based game for an undisclosed seven-figure sum three months after Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer, released it free of charge last October.

There have also been a large number of searches on the dictionary website for Wordles that reflected current affairs, including “oligarch”, “vulnerable” – that may have been prompted by the cost of living crisis – and “ableist”, which spiked during the controversy over the pop song by Lizzo.