LANGUAGE EXPLAINED
How the Simplicity of English Grammar Makes Wordle Fun To Play
And why Wordle wouldn’t work so well in languages with more complex grammars
If you spend any time on social media, you must have heard of Wordle. After playing it myself yesterday, I got to think about how it could be implemented into other languages. But you know what? That wouldn’t be easy at all. And it’s all because we owe all the fun of this game to some specific quirks of English grammar. What quirks are those? Keep reading to find out.
What is Wordle?
Wordle is an online game in which you have to guess a daily 5-letter word. You can guess up to 6 times and on each iteration, you get clues for the letters in the words you guessed. You know what? Just read the rules off the screenshot from the Wordle website below:
Why English Wordle works
English grammatical endings increase the length of the word, which is why Wordle can work with the word length. For example, compare the word “works” with the present ending “-s” and “worked” with the past ending “-ed”. “Works” has five letters and “worked” has six. This means that when you play, you won’t miss the word solely based on its grammatical form. You will almost always miss or guess the word based on its lexical meaning, like guessing between “work” and “pork”. Guessing between “work” and “pork” is fun, right? They mean completely different things, but they differ only in one letter.
Now, guessing between “works” and “worked” would not be so much fun. You already figured out the gist: The meaning of the word is “work”, yes, but who cares if it’s in the present or past tense… Well, that’s exactly what would happen if we made Wordle, with the same rules, in languages with more inflections and conjugations than English.
How inflections ruin all the fun
The problem is that in languages with many more grammatical endings than in English, the search for a 5-letter word wouldn’t be any easier once you know the first four letters. For example, in a language with cases, like Croatian, a noun like “torba” (bag) can have four different versions of itself and all of them with 5 letters!
These are “torba, torbe, torbu, torbi”, and they refer to the nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative/locative case of “torba” (bag), respectively. So, even after you’ve figured out “torb-”, you would still have to guess the grammatical ending indicating the case of the noun. Provided you haven’t ruled out any of the other vowels, you would have a hard time figuring it out, and you might need up to 4 trials to guess it. I think it’s pretty clear this would be more frustrating than fun.
This is not to say that maybe there isn’t a way to get around this problem, by tweaking some Wordle rules. Maybe we could accept all the different versions of “torba” (bag) as correct in the Croatian Wordle. But even then, it just doesn’t sound like as much fun to find out that the word of the day was “torba, torbe, torbu, torbi”!
So basically, inflections can kill all the fun of playing Wordle, and since English doesn’t have any, it’s a perfect fit for such a game. The simplicity of English grammar is once again a highly profitable feature. I say “once again” because all L2 speakers of English, including me, are very thankful for this simplicity.
With this game becoming so popular, I’m sure there will be interest in translating it, so this “inflection problem” is something developers will definitely have to take into account. Maybe they will find an easy solution and maybe this problem isn’t as big as I’m making it. We’ll wait and see, but I’m sure it will be quite some time before we see a functional version of a Croatian Wordle.
Until then, keep an eye out for linguistic quirks like this one. They pop up everywhere!
Update: New Wordles popping up
After I wrote this I realized there is already Wordle in a few other languages, and new ones are popping up all the time.
UPDATE on my experience in Wordle: I just played The New York Times Wordle and it’s much harder than the original version I linked above because the words you need to guess are simply rarer and less known. I didn’t even know the word that was the guess for today! Granted I am an L2 speaker of English, but this has never happened with the original version.
And an update on the Croatian Wordle, there is one already! Here it is: https://kveez.com/hr/rijecek/
From what I can see, the problem of inflections was simply solved by only including the nominative versions of nouns, as they are listed in the dictionary, e.g. “torba”. A relatively easy fix, but it feels a bit strange that all these inflected words will never be a correct solution, although they are accepted as possible words. There is also no rule that says that only the nominative versions of nouns are possible solutions, so this is something you need to figure out as you play.
Moreover, I think that the Croatian Wordle is easier to guess than the English one. Now, I am aware the reason for this could also be that I am a native speaker of Croatian, but I talked to some intermediate L2 speakers of Croatian and they agreed! I think the reason for this is that there are less words of 5 letters in Croatian than there are in English. Croatian words are typically longer, like “trčati” for “run”, or “mladost” for “youth”. So, when you play Wordle that means that there are less 5-letter words to choose from and that makes it easier!
