[hyperbovine]

It’s this. There are many five letter words that are not “wordley”. Words such as, idk, bokeh, are technically part of the lexicon but would never appear as a solution. The wordle bot will even tell you this if you guess them — “good guess, but unlikely to appear as a solution”. The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.

[gretch]

> The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.

Not my experience at all.

Ask me how I know what an EPEE is

[rhplus]

EPEE is a common fill word from a lexicon informally known as crosswordese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosswordese

Really no harder than memorizing all the 2 and 3 letter words in Scrabble and many players will pick most up in a few months.

[cyode]

I didn’t know it was called crosswordese! I wonder what the most common term used is. As a very occasional player, for some reason ARIA, IBIS, and VENI/VIDI/VICI stick out, but I’m sure it’s actually one with an E.

[all_factz]

VENI/VIDI/VICI are easy for anyone who studied Latin (as indeed used to be common), and ARIA is similarly easy for anyone who knows about opera. Basically, the crossword is for snobs.

[swores]

I agree that crosswords often include cultural references that lean towards certain demographics / assuming particular education, and that can feel exclusionary if you don’t share that background - and there's even an argument to suggest snobbery might be behind those choices.

But I disagree that that makes it for snobs. Snobbery is more about an attitude of looking down on others or their tastes, whereas knowing Latin or being a fan of opera is really just about exposure.

Sure, there exist some (too many) opera fans who would say something like "it's real art compared to pop or hip hop being low class trash", but that's not a defining part of liking opera and plenty of people who like opera aren't snobs. Ironically it's a different form of snobbery (sometimes called reverse snobbery though personally I hate that term), to dismiss anyone who learned Latin or who likes opera as being a snob!

[thaumasiotes]

Major crossword offenders:

ERR, ORCA, OBOE, ALOE, ORE, ODE

[Thorrez]

The middle 4 are all fairly common words. "Ode" isn't super common, but I hear it in "An ode to..." phrases. And "err" I've only ever heard in 1 phrase: "To err is human."

[thaumasiotes]

> The middle 4 are all fairly common words.

That's not really the concept. People know what an orca is.

But if you see a crossword clue that says "black and white animal", you know that the answer is ORCA without even needing to look at the number of letters in the answer. (Could it be "skunk"? Could it be "panda"? No, those are stupid questions.) Same thing if the clue is "marine predator". (Could that be "shark"? No.) The words I listed are incredibly likely to appear in crossword puzzles. That's what's weird about them.

[DamnInteresting]

See also: "Err on the side of caution."

[Suppafly]

certain crossword authors like certain words, there is one that almost always uses OREO in their puzzles.

[thaumasiotes]

An épée is one of three types of sword used in the three styles of Western fencing. As such, it's about as technical as, say, the words "touchdown" or "mitt".

It's also just the regular French word that means "sword". But although crossword puzzles frequently ask you to know common French words, I've never seen one clue the answer EPEE that way.

[seanhunter]

Epee is not an obscure word. It's an olympic event for goodness sake.

[TimorousBestie]

> Ask me how I know what an EPEE is

That’s when you’re like, only tangentially involved with the making of a movie or tv show, but too famous to go without a credit?

[busyant]

> EPEE

They love that one.

[wombatpm]

If you took fencing at an Ivy League school for you PR requirement you would know all about foil, saber, and epee fencing. Not everyone gets to row crew.

[hvb2]

Wholly offtopic but just posting because I thought it was awesome...

During Covid I saw an ad for a fencing school how it was the best sport during Covid.

You wear a mask

You keep your distance

And if someone doesn't, you stick em with the pointy end

:)

[thaumasiotes]

It's actually a terrible sport for covid, involving heavy breathing in close proximity to other people indoors.

Any outdoor sport would be better.

[busyant]

I'm not sure if this is a humble-brag and/or if it's a subtle dig at the out-of-touch lives of NYT crossword players.

Don't forget sailing and equestrian.

[enlyth]

And any 4 letter instrument is usually OBOE and a fish related clue is EELS

[ted_bunny]

Ah yes, good old ARA Parseghian. That guy.

[groggo]

IMO scrabble would be improved by a similar limitation. There's too many nonsense words.

[ameliaquining]

Scrabble is a competitive game, not a puzzle, and therefore subject to a different set of constraints. (Players in a competitive game are trying to win; a puzzle author, if they're any good at their job, is ultimately trying to lose.)

In particular, you have to consider the equilibrium. If you only allow a subset of words in Scrabble, this replaces the competitive advantage from knowing lots of words that no one uses in real life, with a competitive advantage from knowing the exact contours of the border between acceptable and unacceptable words. I would argue that this is even worse; at least if you learn lots of Scrabble words you're learning something about the real world.

By contrast, Wordle can self-impose whatever constraints they want on solutions, and people don't have to know what those constraints are in order to solve the puzzle. (It can help a little on the margin, which in a perfect world would not be the case, but it's much less of a problem for the puzzle-solving experience than the Scrabble equivalent would be.)

[groggo]

Ya that's a good point for competitive scrabble. However today I think a lot of people's main exposure to Scrabble comes from WordsWithFriends (and recently, the new NYT games version). In those games, there's no penalty for getting a wrong word, it just won't let you play it. In that context, I at least think it would be nice to have a setting with a more limited list... it could be like Chess timed variants.

It's obviously an impossible challenge to draw those contours in language. Wordle did pretty well though! And going the other direction, just allowing everything that could possibly a word, just starts getting ridiculous.

[ameliaquining]

Even in casual Scrabble-like games, I expect using a restricted set of words would create a lot of "come on, that's totally a real word, why can't I use it" moments. Most people know at least a few uncommon words that most other people don't (because it's different words for each person).

The Wordle list of legal guesses is not substantially curated; AFAIK basically all five-letter words legal in Scrabble are on it (except on offensiveness grounds, which was a highly controversial decision). If this were not the case, I predict you'd get user dissatisfaction as per above. Wordle's list of possible answers is much more curated, but that's my point; it can err on the side of conservatism, because users won't notice if a word that they'd expect to be on there is missing, whereas they will notice if such a word is not allowed as a guess.

[enlyth]

Will Anderson has an excellent Scrabble related channel on YouTube, would recommend to anyone who is interested

[wartijn_]

Wouldn’t that make Scrabble only harder and more annoying to play? With that limitation you’ll get situations where you play a perfectly valid word, but it gets rejected because it’s not in the list of approved words. To get good at that version of the game, you’ll have to study the Scrabble word list instead of the dictionary.

With Wordle the limitation is only put on the words the game generates as answers. You can use obscure words to guess, they just won’t be the answer.

[zem]

this is already the case with scrabble; there is a strictly defined scrabble word list that determines whether a word is acceptable or not, and it often leaves out words that you might find in some other dictionary that is not the official scrabble one (collins for most of the world, or a custom dictionary for american scrabble)

[wartijn_]

Ah ok. Shows what I know about Scrabble.

[badgersnake]

Caulk is in there, I would say that’s fairly technical. My wife didn’t know it.

[nasmorn]

I am not a native speaker but how does your wife name the caulk in the shower? Silicone? Or do you maintain it in such pristine condition that no word was ever spoken about it?

[thaumasiotes]

I assume she calls it grout, like a normal person. ;D

[badc0ffee]

Caulk and grout are different things. She calls the sandy stone stuff between the tiles the same thing as the rubbery bead in the corner?

[thaumasiotes]

If it were me, I'd call a rubbery bead in the corner "sealant".

[badgersnake]

Yeah, silicone or just sealant. Maybe it’s an Americanism.

[_whiteCaps_]

I don't think so - wooden ships have been caulked to seal the planks for a long time.