‘Cruciverbalist’
The virally popular game Wordle, recently acquired by the New York Times for a reported “low seven figures,” has been making news. The game was created by software developer Charles Wardle, punning off his own surname. It was a side project to charm his partner, who had become an obsessive lover of word games during pandemic lockdowns. In the span of just a few months, Wordle went from a user base of 90 to 300,000 to many millions. I played it for the first time over someone’s shoulder, meaning it had become visually unavoidable, and finally caved to the number of people texting me their little green boxes for letters in the correct spot and played on my own phone the past few days. The New York Times is a good landing spot for Wordle, as its Spelling Bee game has also taken off in the past few years, and its Mini Crossword has been grown with verve by editor Joel Fagliano from a throwaway afterthought to having a real fandom as dedicated to the 30-second morsel as we fogies are to Will Shortz’s legendary full-sized New York Times crossword.
Author and professor Nicholas Christakis notes that “agora,” “whore,” “fibre,” “wench,” and “slave” have been removed from the list of guessable words, presumably for offensiveness/sensitivity reasons in at least some cases. (Fibre is just not a word in American English usage. Arguably ditto for agora, though it’s a bad argument.) This is the New York Times’s prerogative. It will fall to any word game that draws on existing vocabulary to delineate what counts and what does not, though it’s oddly condescending to theorize that the word “slave” is beyond players’ emotional capacity to type. Merriam-Webster maintains a regularly updating Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, currently in its sixth edition. In my house, we continue to play with the fourth edition because the fifth edition is when Big Wordgame started adulterating its inclusion decisions with words intended to sound rad or funny (e.g., “ridic,” “LOL”), rather than ones that reflect common usage or contribute to good gameplay. (Merriam-Webster, if you’re reading this, please explain to me why “xi” should be on the list of precious two-letter words, but “co” should not. Explain why anglicized French words such as rendezvous and noir count but Latin phrases in common English usage such as ibid or status quo don’t make the cut.)
The one thing to say about Wordle to its discredit is that it’s barely a word game as such. We used to play a version of it called Pico Fermi Bagel, available online, in my sixth-grade math class. The game is the same whether it involves numerical digits or letters, really, because Wordle is actually more of a logic game that uses the existing vocabulary of English five-letter words to challenge the player to find the answer that follows from inferential clues. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s closer to Minesweeper or Sudoku than it is to Boggle.
The best word games, such as Scrabble, involve some game dynamic that draws upon the whole vocabulary of English (well, the whole vocabulary of words 15 letters and fewer). The worst word game, Bananagrams, just makes no sense. In Bananagrams, it’s strategic to just dawdle along by adding S’s and T’s and such to small, simple Latinate words while formulating a plan to play the rest of your tiles quickly when there are none left to take, striking like a logophilic viper. For my money, the best way to work out that wordy part of your brain is the good old crossword, which involves wordplay, trivia, and vocabulary. A fun word for crossworder, by the way: cruciverbalist.