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by danpalmer 488 days ago
This is really neat!

I tried looking up the word that I always use to start and it wasn't in the data, which is odd because I know I had a 1-guess win, and I'm fairly sure it would have been with the word I use every day. That said I checked with another list of Wordle words and can't see it there. Maybe it was before the switch to the NYT.
2 comments
CamperBob2 488 days ago
I looked up my least-favorite Wordle of all time, HUNKY, and it's not there either. It's not a complete list.
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crtez 488 days ago
Yep, BESET (3/39/2023) is the first data point that’s available, as far as I can tell. Any reason you didn’t like HUNKY?
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danpalmer 488 days ago
There are a lot of words in Wordle that are a bit US focused. I've never heard someone outside US media use the word "Hunky", so wouldn't expect it to feature in the ~2500(?) common 5 letter words that Wordles are/were chosen from.

Strands and Connections are way worse for this. I'm British, my partner is Australian, about half the time the games are noticeably US focused, and maybe 20% of the time we just can't get them because it's about sports we don't have or slang we don't have or some cultural thing that just doesn't translate.

I wish The Guardian had a better selection of these games because we find their crosswords much better for example.

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CamperBob2 488 days ago
It's BS. Considered pejorative to Hungarians, so it never occurred to me to guess it. :-|
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crtez 488 days ago
Thanks! And yeah, the data only goes back to the first (as far as I can tell) average that’s available—BESET.

There’s a couple of more quirks here and there that I’ve found-the NYT also tracks (for users that are logged in) the Unix time of completion for your Wordle each day.

I was originally planning on making a heatmap to show people’s completion time patterns, but since I was tracking my own times, I found that the NYT’s data on my completion times was erratic and occasionally incorrect (within the same day but off by hours) up until like 3 months ago? So it’s kind of funny to think that we can track bug fixes through simple data comparisons.

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