Nearly 75,000 searches on the dictionary website were made for the term “homer” the week the baseball term appeared as an answer to the May 5 online five-letter word puzzle. Editors said Wordle’s answers dominated searches that grew on the dictionary’s website. The informal US term for a home run it topped 95 percent of searches for it outside of North America. The American spelling of “humor” saw the second biggest rise of the year. The third was “caulk,” a term more familiar to American English than British that means to fill the gaps around the edge of something, such as a bath or window frame, with a special substance. Americans, in turn, grumbled about the “bloke,” which appeared on Wordle on July 25.
English speakers divided
Wendalyn Nichols, head of publishing at Cambridge Dictionary, said: “Word’s words, and the public’s reactions to them, show how English speakers continue to be divided about the differences between varieties of the English language, even as they play a global popular new word game that has brought people together on the Internet for a friendly competition about language. “The differences between British and American English are always of interest not only to English learners, but to English speakers worldwide, and word games are always fun too. “We’ve seen these two phenomena converge in public discussions about Wordle and how five-letter words have simply taken over searches on the Cambridge Dictionary website.” Wordle boasted millions of daily players after hitting the world earlier this year. The New York Times bought the online game for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, three months after Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer, released it online for free last October. It has a single daily solution in which players have six guesses, much like the 1955 pen and paper game Jotto and the Lingo TV game franchise.
Searches reflect current affairs
Searches for Wordle’s five-letter words on the Cambridge Dictionary website turned up other high-interest words that reflected current affairs. These included “oligarch”, likely caused by new international sanctions and geopolitical changes amid Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, and “vulnerable”, which may have been caused by inflation and the cost-of-living crisis affecting many nations worldwide. “Ableist” was launched during the controversy over the use of a profanity in the lyrics of Lizzo’s pop song Grrrls. Additions to the Cambridge Dictionary this year included “shrinkflation”, defined as the situation where the price of a product remains the same but its size becomes smaller. If you like word games, try the new Telegraph Puzzles site, where you’ll find a daily selection of our world-famous crosswords and our unique logic puzzle, PlusWord.
