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Wordle Derivations

Wordle Derivations, Localizations, Translations, and Variations

Go to this page by Júda Ronén for a more complete and prettier list!

Part 1: Wordle derivations that already exist

NOTA BENE: Some of these may have existed before

English

  • Wordle - the original, limited to one word per day
  • Absurdle - adversarial word selection, not limited to 1 per day
  • WordGuessr - puzzles with 3-7 letter words, not limited to 1 per day
  • Word Master - not limited to 1 per day; this version seems easier to modify than the original and as such there are many forks based on it.

Basque

Belarusian

Catalan

  • WORDLE🏴󠁥󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 - vowel accents and punt volat ignored (e.g. col·là input as colla). The emoji in the title is supposed to be the flag of Catalonia but that emoji doesn't render properly on any of my devices.

Danish

Dutch

  • Woordle - IJ treated as two letters
  • Woordle6 - same as above but with 6-letter words

Filipino

Finnish

  • Sanuli - appears to use WebAssembly, which I haven't seen on other Wordles yet.

French

  • Le Mot - all diacritics ignored, œ treated as two letters (e.g. bœuf input as boeuf), input keyboard is rearranged to AZERTY which is a nice touch
  • LeMOT - same comments as above
  • Motus - NOT based on Wordle, but an online version of the French game-show with very similar gameplay; nonsense words are permitted
  • Sutom - like Motus above but does not permit nonsense words
  • Moket - Like Sutom above
  • Wordle du Jour

Galician

  • #WordleGalego - vowel accents are ignored (e.g. ámote input as amote)

German

  • Wordle.at - umlauts ignored, ß treated as two letters (e.g. eiße input as eisse). Based on the TLD I would guess it may have some Austrian-specific words but I haven't looked into it.
  • Word Master Deutsch - Derived from English-language Word Master, which is itself derived from Wordle.
  • Wort Meister - Derived from English-language Word Master, which is itself derived from Wordle.
  • Wordle auf Deutsch
  • Wörtle - appears to be modified from Queerdle. Treats ß as distinct from ss.

Greek

  • Word Master Greek - Derived from English-language Word Master, which is itself derived from Wordle. All majuscule, so no need to distinguish between σ and ς. Unlimited plays per day.

Hebrew

  • בול במילה - Vowels are ignored. It looks like word-final forms of letters are treated as distinct from their initial/medial forms, that seems like it would effect gameplay a lot.
  • מדויקת - Vowels are ignored. Word-final forms of letters not distinguished from initial/medial forms.

Icelandic

  • Orðill - accented vowels and Æ are treated as distinct symbols

Indonesian

Irish

  • Foclach - accented vowels treated as distinct symbols. Derived from English-language Word Master which is itself derived from Wordle.

Italian

  • PAR🇮🇹LE - vowel accents are ignored (e.g. caffè input as caffe)
  • Parolette - vowel accents ignored
  • Verba - è and à treated as distinct from e and a

Lithuanian

  • Unnamed fork of Word Master - I don't see a deployment anywhere but this looks like it will become a Lithuanian version at some point

Māori

  • Panga - accented vowels are distinct, ng and wh digraphs are distinct

Norwegian

  • Ordle - I love that it provides both Bokmål and Nynorsk options. ø, æ, and å are treated as letters in their own right.

Polish

  • Sudoku Wordle - The keyboard provides q, v, and x but none of the dictionary words use those letters.
  • Literalnie - Word bank has a few x words, a few v words, but no q words
  • Wyrazik.pl - Has relatively plenty q v and x words

Portuguese

  • Termo - Brazilian Portuguese, all diacritics ignored (e.g. maçãs input as macas)
  • Word Master Português - Fork of Word Master, all diacritics ignored
  • Unnamed fork of Word Master - I don't see a deployment anywhere but this looks like it will become a Portuguese version at some point
  • Letreco - All diacritics ignored

Russian

Scots Gaelic

  • Facle - accented vowels treated as distinct symbols

Spanish

  • Wordle (ES) - vowel accents ignored (e.g. agüés input as agues, añejó input as añejo)
  • Word Master Español - Accented letters are treated as distinct, but ü appears to be missing.

Swedish

Tagalog

see Filipino

Welsh

  • Gairglo - Treats Welsh digraphs as, well, digraphs. I tried to look at the underlying code and there appears to be an entire 34 MB Welsh dictionary in one of the chunks?? With words of all lengths and their definitions and parts of speech??

Yiddish

Part 2: disjointed thoughts on Wordle derivations that could exist

I think lots of Wordle derivatives could be almost-automatically generated, given a proper text corpus.

What would Wordle look like for nonlinear scripts? Scripts with vowels markers written above/below consonants (Arabic, Tibetan, Thaana, etc.); scripts with combining letterforms (Arabic, Mongolian, Devanāgarī, etc.); scripts with stacked consonants, syllable markers, (Tibetan); scripts with multiple identical-looking glyphs (Mongolian ಠ_ಠ)?

How would the game feel in a language like Hawaiʻian, and what would an optimal strategy look like? If you know there are no consonant clusters and the final letter must be a vowel, does that make the game less interesting?

If I have a little time I am going to make a Nuosu language version...

Many thanks to Kurt who also has been collecting Wordle variants! Now we are up to TWENTY-SEVEN Wordlable languages!

Thank you @interfect for teaching me how to build and deploy a fork of Word Master! I think I have the key parts ready for a naïve Faroese version which I will now use to encourage more people to make Wordle translations.

@felix9
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felix9 commented Jan 17, 2022

Prior art:

  • There are a lot of Bulls and Cows (aka Mastermind) variants both online and off, and it's sometimes a minigame in larger games. I think it's probably sensible to restrict this list to "uses words".
  • There are a lot of "guess the word" games with different types of clues. I think it's probably sensible to restrict this list to "guessing a word gives letter position clues".
  • Word Mastermind (1972) is the oldest physical variant I know. There were a couple clones published under different names around the same time. The clues in this do not tell you which letters are correct, so it's harder than Wordle.
    • Jotto (1955) is earlier, but the clues do not tell you if a letter is in the right place or not.
  • Lingo (1987) is a TV game show very similar to Wordle, using a randomly chosen first guess.

Unsure about prior computer versions; I think I've seen some, but I don't remember exactly, and I haven't yet tracked any down.

Orthogonal dimension: a nontrivial innovation of Wordle is the social sharing tease. There are a lot of games with social sharing, but I can't think of anything that hits quite the same notes (text art, full transcript, everyone takes different paths to the same destination, transcripts hide info that's sometimes deducible).

@settinger
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@felix9 Thank you for the prior art! You're right, the social aspect of the original Wordle is really well-done and definitely part of the appeal. I was delighted to learn the creator is also responsible for Reddit Place and The Button, what a portfolio!

@dvergur
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dvergur commented Jan 30, 2022

Hello, I stumbled on your list and discovered a few variations such as "Saltong Mini and Saltong Max which I did not have on my list
I noticed you're working on a Faroese version, and I'd would like to be notified as soon as it's done. If that is possible.

@settinger
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@dvergur Takk fyri, Óli! I used Faroese to test my localization template, but I am not familiar enough with the language to make a complete version. You can find that template here, if you are interested: https://github.com/settinger/word-master-l10n-template

That template is designed to be as code-free as possible, but as such is quite limited. A more versatile localization tool is here: https://blog.mothertongues.org/wordle/

Júda Ronén is also maintaining a Wordles list, here: https://rwmpelstilzchen.gitlab.io/wordles/

According to that list, there is already a Faroese version at https://ð.fo/ (I love that URL)

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