Another day, one other irksome Wordle conundrum. Like
puzzle #265 earlier than it,
today’s Wordle is proving a very difficult beast for gamers round the world to reckon with – however not for the identical causes as its predecessor. Once once more, SociallyKeeda spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK’s University of Warwick, to discover out the granular particulars behind puzzle #270. We additionally heard from Shaun Savage, Editor in Chief at Try Hard Games Guides, for more on today’s troublesome time period.
Naturally, we’ll be divulging the resolution to today’s puzzle beneath, so flip again now for those who’re dedicated to weathering the newest Wordle alone. So, girls and gents, today’s Wordle answer is
CATER. Granted, that’s decidedly more obscure than WATCH (puzzle #265), nevertheless it’s not precisely a time period that calls for you dig out a dictionary. Dr Voice defined to us final week that WATCH was a chief instance of an n-gram, i.e. a bunch of letters of a size (n) that generally cluster collectively. Again, CATER ends with an n-gram with a size of 4 letters – a quadrigram – which presents related issues, on high of some additional phrase-particular problem.
It's all in the morphology
“Looking back at
Project Gutenberg's list of common n-grams,” Dr Voice tells us, “you can really see why getting some of today's letters in place isn't necessarily narrowing down the possibilities. ER is the fourth most common combination of any two letters in the whole of the English language, it seems, and TER the twelfth most common combination of three.”“That said,” he provides, “I also think it's interesting to think about why 'cater' might not seem like an immediately obvious option to everyone who's got the point of finding _ATER. The answer to this might be to do with our expectations about morphology – the way we combine together different parts of language to make new words.”Morphology. Right, we’re following. “ER is a very common bigram partly because '-er' is a highly productive suffix in English. It can be added to the end of most verbs in order to make a new noun, usually to describe someone or something doing the original verb. So 'report' becomes 'reporter' and 'play' becomes 'player', for example.”“So we might associate an '-er' ending with nouns in particular. The data for the eleven options to fill the last slot in _ATER bears this out, too: nine of them are nouns, with one adjective ('later') and our solution, 'cater', being the only verb in the group. Players caught thinking of 'verb + -er' words might have overlooked this exception.”So there you've got it, Wordle-ers. CATER is tricking you with its sneaky bigram, which is subsequently encouraging the thoughts to consider 'verb + -er’ phrases (which, in fact, doesn't account for the existence of ‘cater’). This is what we realized from Shaun Savage, Editor in Chief at Try Hard Guides, on the matter of puzzle #270’s web infamy: “While we definitely see more traffic on days where people need help figuring out what possible words the answer could be – with _ATER, people have a few words that likely came to mind! – we have seen the answer post trend higher in these instances, same with 'watch' and 'dodge'.”“This past week's words haven't been too offbeat,” Savage provides. “We have seen steady traffic, but no mega surges like we have for a few words (‘vivid’ comes to mind) that are harder to figure out. The situation with _ATER, though, is that there are lots of possibilities, and all of them fit without specifically trying to eliminate more consonants.”Well then, that is two difficult phrases in the area of 5 days. Come on, Wordle, give us and our damaged streaks a break...
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