[Terr_]

Is Wordle really the best vehicle for that, though? I mean, it tends towards a subset of 5-letters words the audience is more likely to know in advance, excluding a lot of the more-surprising words.

A "click to see more about why this answer fits" crossword, on the other hand...

[lossyalgo]

How often have you played Wordle? I've played well over 1000 games, and at lesat 1/5th of those were words I had to look up. They seem to enjoy picking obscure words in order to make the game more challenging.

[Terr_]

Perhaps the unusual outcomes are just more memorable, and so seem more frequent? Here's a representative sample of 30 that were used very recently.

    Shoal, Hasty, Lobby, Vogue, Gunky, 
    Sheep, Theft, Linen, Slime, Fluke, 
    Hydra, Dizzy, Lance, Shred, Buyer, 
    Attic, Guava, Awake, Stank, Hoist,
    Mogul, Squad, Roost, Skull, Bloom,
    Mooch, Surge, Vegan, Scene, Cello,

None of those stand out as "WTF does that even mean", but maybe I'm the weird one if we adjust for age-demographics or book-reading.

If I had to guess at a riskier 20%... Guava, a fruit some people may not have had; Gunky because it's slang; Mogul, Vogue, and Mooch were borrowed from other languages; Cello is something people may have heard more than read; Hoist.

[yellowapple]

Even as someone who already knows the definitions of 100% of those words, it'd still be neat to see those definitions, and maybe even some etymologies or other interesting trivia. “Cello” would be a great opportunity for a factoid about the oldest known cello, “guava” would be a great opportunity for a quick recipe using guavas, etc.

[lossyalgo]

> Perhaps the unusual outcomes are just more memorable, and so seem more frequent?

That's a good point and could very well be true. I just know I've played plenty of games where I was mad that they didn't show the meaning. So let's say its 5% for native speakers, and up to 20% for non-native speakers - that's still a golden opportunity to expand vocabularies. And honestly it can't be a lot of work to add a couple lines of static text. At worst it would be ignored, and at most, help people learn more interesting words.