Tausi Insider

Photo : DVKi ( Shutterstock ) Wordle is still played the same way as ever, and if you just want a simple game without overthinking it, that’s all you need to know. But things have been changing behind the scenes, and that includes the way solutions are chosen. Originally, the answer each day came from a list of 2000+ words that was embedded in the site’s javascript code . (If you wanted, you could just view the page’s source and look at it.) This list avoided words that were too obscure or that were simple plurals of four-letter words, and over time I found myself developing a sense for whether a word I was mulling over is “Wordle-ish” enough to be the solution for the day. Sometimes, before entering my guess, I would check it against this no-spoilers list : all the Wordle words are there, but not in order. I could Ctrl-F for, say, “minim” to see whether it’s a possible solution. When the New York Times bought the game earlier this year, at first they kept the old word list. (All ...