A Wordle, With a Twist . . .
Ever heard of the game Wordle? With its increasing popularity, millions around the world have not only heard about it but given it a try themselves on the New York Times website. The creator, Josh Wardle, made it as a game for his family and friends, but later published it online in October of 2021. In January 2022, New York Times bought it from him. Now, the daily puzzle on the New York Times website is played by millions worldwide. The best part is that it is very simple to play: All you have to do is guess a 5 letter word, and you have 6 tries to do so. Each time you enter a guess, the box of each letter will turn a specific color, indicating whether the letter is not in the word, in the word but in the wrong spot, or in the correct spot. It’s that simple!
After doing the Wordle a few times and seeing all the variations and versions of Wordle others have made, I suddenly got a brilliant idea: why don’t I make a Wordle for my native language, Marathi (a language spoken by more than 90 million people from the state of Maharashtra in India) ? And so I began developing an iOS application for a Marathi Wordle. I decided to call it प्राकृत (Prakrut), another name for Marathi. Now, the mobile application is published on the app store and anyone who speaks Marathi can download it for free and enjoy playing Wordle in Marathi! Here is the link:
Just like the original Wordle, the app has a help screen providing directions on how to play the game. There is a settings page where you can select the theme of the app and choose to play in easy mode or hard mode. Both these pages display a beautiful background animation. There is a statistics page displaying your wins, win percentage, etc. You can also share the results of the game with the rest of the world on social platforms, just like the original Wordle. For the game itself, it works just like the original Wordle, except for the fact that the Marathi language works a little differently than English. In short, consonants and vowels combine to make a letter, making the logic for the game more complicated than the original Wordle. So, I made it so that it would change the colors of the letters based on the accuracy of the consonant, and automatically change to show the version of it with the correct vowel. Also, you can play as many games as you want without it being limited to one per day.
In the future, I plan to make many additions to the app, utilizing data science to make the experience even better. Future updates will show:
- The definition of the word
- The word used in an example sentence
- Statistics about how often it was guessed by other users
- PDFs of literary texts will be read and parsed using Python scripts, collecting lots of data about thousands of words. This will provide insight into the following:
- How the word’s use changed over the span of several hundred years
- The context in which the word is used
On a side note, this app is only supported on iOS currently. But, I will try to add Android support in the next version. In the next blog, I will go over the progress I have made on the features mentioned earlier. So, stay tuned for the next blog!
