(“I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque!” is a Bugs Bunny catchphrase.)
The last two words, PRATE and DRECK, are certainly not common words. Not in my vocabulary, anyway. When did the game change? Or did the game ever change? I thought Josh Wardle created this game for his girlfriend for commonly used words…?
I’m not all that well-read but I think my vocabulary is decent, and I’ve never heard these words before. I’ve certainly never used them.
I have a small Wordle streak going and it almost ended today. I just barely got PRATE because it was in a word search tool I sometimes use. The tool helped me with DRECK, too.
Prate: To prate means to talk long and idly, chattering excessively about unimportant, foolish, or meaningless matters.
Dreck: Dreck is an informal noun that refers to anything worthless, of poor quality, trashy, or acting as literal or figurative filth (such as junk items, bad movies, or sloppy writing).
Frate: The word frate primarily means a friar or monk in Italian, though it carries different meanings and slang uses depending on the language and region.
Urate: Urate is the ionized or salt form of uric acid (C₅H₄N₄O₃), which is a natural waste product created when your body breaks down purines—chemicals found in your cells and in certain foods and drinks (like red meat, seafood, and alcohol).
Wrate: wrate a minute! These are not real words!
Okay.
Wrate: Wrate is an obsolete or archaic simple past tense of the verb write (meaning to form letters or words on a surface).
In January 2021, he (Josh Wardle) returned to his 2013 prototype to create a word game for his partner, Palak Shah. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he and Shah had played many New York Times games including Spelling Bee, and he wanted to make a new word game that they could play together. Shah played a vital role in the game’s development before it went public. She reviewed the 12,000 five-letter words in the English language and narrowed them down to 2,500 commonly-known words that could be used in the daily puzzle.
“Prate” is the infinitive verb form of the more common word “prattle”. You’ve probably heard of that one.
“Dreck” is from Yiddish. Everyone in the US Northeast knows what it is and many people use it routinely. The rest of the USA? Not so much.
I suspect that they’ve long since run out of “common” = obvious words. And need to avoid getting repetitive by running the same e.g. 200 words over and over. So they’re forced to salt in ever more obscure words to keep the faithful satisfied. And learning.
I play for fun I use a different start word everyday, I don’t analyze the probabilities or check past history it’s just an enjoyable pastime. My record looks pretty good, and I learn new words on occasion too.
Yeah, prate pissed me off because it cost me my 30 day streak. I got dreck on my last guess.
My approach is to start with 5 of the most commonly used letters in the alphabet: A, E, S, T, and R in some variation (usually I start with stare or tears). My sweet spot is normally the 4th guess.
I’ve seen “dreck” (or its alternate, drek) used in various science fiction constructed languages over the years - I think it might have been part of Manny’s usage in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress?
“Prate” I’ve also seen before, though it’s certainly not super common. I guess it seemed common enough to Palak Shah.
Apparently same. Dreck is a very common “slang” word that my friends and I used all the time in high school and beyond, even still to this day. But it makes sense because Connecticut.
Your assumption of 200 is off by an order of magnitude. If it were that low you’d be absolutely right, but there are plenty of common words to go for years without repeating.
Wardle’s original answer list had 2309 possible answers, all pretty darn common. 2309 days is around 6 years, 4 months. You probably don’t want to run through the entire list before restarting, though, to keep the players guessing. Every 4 years or so do an announced reshuffling where all answers are once again valid. Done and done.
Adding more obscure words without first reshuffling is both counterproductive and unsustainable.
EDIT: Google is telling me that Wordle was published publicly in Oct 2021, and had 90 players as of that Nov 1st. It’s been 1832 days since since that Nov 1st, so we’re probably already past the point when they should have reshuffled. Adding more obscure words shouldn’t have ever been an option.
Incidentally, the valid guess list, which includes all 5 letter words, has just shy of 13,000 words.
I’m from the Midwest, and I know the word DRECK. I was surprised that Wordle used it, though. PRATE, I’ve never heard of (nor has my spellcheck, which just changed it to pirate), but after my second guess I was left with P_ATE and L was aleardy grayed out, so I got lucky.
I’m on a 5-day streak of getting the word on the 3rd guess. Ordinarily I’m lucky if I get it on the 3rd guess twice in one week. I don’t even know why I still play, I don’t really like it. I think I hate-play it.
I bet I saw dreck used a number of times in MAD Magazine back in the mid-1960s when I was a subscriber. If I am correct about that, that would have shared it with lots of people who didn’t live in the Northeast or have Jewish roots. I expect that’s where I originally became familiar with it, but I’ve seen it many times since I let my subscription lapse.
My 50 year old American Heritage dictionary defines prate as “to talk idly and at great length; chatter” and my impression of its use is that it’s generally used to describe when someone is stuck having to listen to a person who is prating on.
My impression is that its use is less common now than it was 50+ years ago. But I’d certainly regard its use as fair game.
Now don’t get me started on LORIS. “I am the Loris, I speak for the shrubbery.” It apparently was a NYT add rather than a word on Josh Wardle’s original list. (More than three dozen of the solutions so far were added by the NYT after they took over management of the game, and weren’t on Josh Wardle’s original solutions list.)
