The recent announcement by the New York Times that the #Wordle puzzle will start reusing previous words has caused a bit of a stir with its fanbase.
I does make you wonder why? Are we running out of five-letter words?
Always up for a bit of analysis, I've done the number crunching on a 450+ thousand word dictionary of English words.
Personally, I'm struggling to see why this is an issue.
I can't normally remember what I had for breakfast so I'm not going to recall that a Wordle answer was previously used on October 17th 2023!
You're of course quite right that there are plenty of words to keep going for ages without repeats so there's no need to start reusing words at this time.
Perhaps the unused words will become increasingly uncommon though? If so, this might make the puzzle increasingly harder - particularly for newer players.
If that's the case, reusing words may just be maintaining the difficulty / accessibility level...
@Lefthandbass59 @daj
I agree with your comment in all points, Gareth. Thank you for putting it more succinctly than I would have.
@swoonie @Lefthandbass59 For me, it was mostly an exercise in how many words were available!
