Words on Thinking about Wordle

Turns out there’s some flex in this number

An Atlantic article on Wordle, everyone’s current word obsession (except mine) reminded me of a conversation I had about 40 years ago. I think it was late 1981 (as opposed to early 1982) when a friend found that the average adult English speaker knew about 20,000 words. That number struck him as way too high. How could he possibly know 20,00 words?[1] I, on the other hand, totally believed this. Even then, still in my teens, I knew so many words that you just couldn’t fit into everyday conversation, no
matter how hard you tried.[2] The problem is really knowing how many words you know. While everyone else I know has been obsessing over Wordle,[3] I’ve been playing the NYT’s Spelling Bee game, where you make words from a set of seven letters, with one letter needing to be in every word. I’m always amazed at the words I miss. In one recent game, I failed to play the word “ninth.”[4] But let’s get back to my friend’s dorm room in 1981.

I miss the simplest
words in these.
(Not today's either.)

I realized there was a way we could test this. His desk dictionary [5] promised 250,000 entries. I am rarely the most mathematically inclined person in the room[6], and in this situation I was most definitely not the most mathematically inclined person in the room, but I realized that we could come up with a random sample of words, test each other’s knowledge, and then do the math. I do not remember how many words we settled on or whether it would be a statistical sample, but let’s say it was twenty-five each.

We set it up like this: We took turns as Questioner and Responder. The questioner would open the book at random and that’s where his choice ended. The other one would specify a column (out of the four) and a word, counting either from the top or the bottom. (so, third column, fifth from the bottom.) We figured this would stop the questioner from choosing the most obscure word on the page. [7]

Just in case you haven’t
seen one of these recently (though
this is a hardback).

In one round, I simply said, “You know this one, you get the point.” He asked for the word anyway. “Jockstrap.”[8] He confirmed that he knew what that was. Through the game there were plenty of words that he did know and plenty that he didn’t. And the same was true for me. When we did the math.[9] He averaged out to 20,000 words. I had done slightly better. This was no shock. I suspect forty years on, he has learned words the meanings of which are obscure to me, but I suspect in the aggregate I still know more words. Not bragging.[10]

See, I have played.

That brings me back to Wordle and Spelling Bee. Neither of these games require a particularly large vocabulary. I keep finding that words I think perfectly acceptable aren’t listed (presumably because they’re considered obscure), yet one Spelling Bee had épée (though without the accents) on its word list. I was a little irked because even though the word shows up in English-language dictionaries,[11] it’s clearly a French word.[12] In all these games, it’s not so much a question of how big your vocabulary is, it’s how well you can access it. Now I just need a word that uses all seven letters in today’s Spelling Bee.[13]

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1. Spoiler alert: he did, and has certainly learned words since that hadn’t been coined in 1981.  ↩

2. Of course I tried.  ↩

3. I’ve played it and keep meaning to go back to it.  ↩

4. An obscure word like that? Who can blame me?  ↩

5. If memory serves, he had the paperback edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, if memory plays false, something else.  ↩

6. Often the least.  ↩

7. You don’t know what “squamous” means?  ↩

8. I don’t need to define this, do I? I'm not providing an illustration either.  ↩

9. By which I mean he did, but we were in his room and I probably didn’t have my calculator with me.  ↩

10. Okay, totally bragging. Can’t do math, but at least I do words. That said, after taking the picture of a dictionary spread, I looked at the third word from the bottom of the second column. Totally obscure to me.  ↩

11. Webster’s Ninth Collegiate has it, complete with acute accents.  ↩

12. In one puzzled with a center M, I was peeved that neither “milt” nor “muntin” were permitted.  ↩

13. No hints. Early on, I stumbled on a tweet where someone had posted the whole list. I stopped playing that one.  ↩