The New York Times has changed Wordle’s solutions

theverge.com:

Wordle’s acquisition by The New York Times has already stirred up controversy, from broken streaks to accusations the game has become harder. But here’s a big change the NYT isn’t shouting about: it’s altered Wordle’s solutions. As of today, February 15th (game number 241), the New York Times version of Wordle and the original version hosted at powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle have diverged and will now continue forever out of step.

Changes to Wordle’s word list by the NYT were spotted last week by a number of sources, including BoingBoing. Although some thought these changes only applied to the words you could guess, it turns out the Times also altered the list of possible solutions. (The Verge made this mistake as well — we regret the error.) This confusion wasn’t helped by the fact that the Times itself was running round telling publications that everything was the same in Wordle land. As NYT comms director Jordan Cohen told The Guardian: “Nothing has changed about the game play.” Which is really not true!

Sure, the game plays the same, but the Times has not only removed rude words like “pussy” and “whore” from possible guesses, it’s also changed the game’s future solutions. And surely for a game all about guessing words this counts as a change to gameplay.

Warning: spoilers for the non-NYT version of Wordlefollow.

As BoingBoing notes, words that have been removed from guesses and solutions include “fibre,” “pupal,” “slave,” and “wench.” You can find a list of the original Wordle solutions here and can check that against NYT’s altered list by following these instructions here. A warning: clicking these links will spoil future solutions for you if you scroll too far ahead, so I’ll save you the danger and just say that the