928. Listen to the interview that got me playing Wordle again. Lynne Murphy shared all sorts of things you probably didn't know about this game!
928. Listen to the interview that got me playing Wordle again. Lynne Murphy shared all sorts of things you probably didn't know about this game!
Lynne Murphy is professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex in England, the author of the book "The Prodigal Tongue," and the writer of the long-running Separated by a Common Language blog.
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MIGNON FOGARTY
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff, and we are going to talk about other cool stuff today because I have with me Lynne Murphy, professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex in England, author of one of my favorite books of all time, "The Prodigal Tongue," which is about the differences between American and British English. And today we're going to talk about that, but also about Wordle. Welcome, Lynne.
LYNNE MURPHY
Thanks, I'm glad to be here.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yes, I am glad to have you here. So to give listeners a little bit of background, you and I were both guests on editor Mark's, Mark Allen's annual word of the year. It's like a Zoom chat thing and Wordle came up. Do you remember why we were talking about Wordle in the first place?
LYNNE MURPHY
Well, we must've been talking about it because it was the topic of many word-of-the-year conversations. So it was Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year was "homer" because it was a Wordle word that had been looked up a lot by people who were frustrated by it being a Wordle word. But all of the editors of all of the dictionaries were there were talking about the Wordle effect in their dictionary lookups: that on certain days there be huge numbers of lookups because some word that was a little bit difficult came up in Wordle. And I remember some of the ones that Cambridge Dictionary had as their high lookup ones were things like "humor" with the American spelling or "caulk" which is a much more used in America word than in Britain. But on the other hand, in Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary, people were looking up words like "voila" or "loamy," so words that felt more foreign in America. So it was interesting to watch the back and forth between players of the game in both countries and what they found difficult about Wordle and what that tells us about our vocabularies.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah, so do you hear people around you in Britain complaining about words that are too American on certain days?
LYNNE MURPHY
On certain days, yes, although there are a fair number of British Wordle players who just, you know, take it in their stride and think, you know, it's a game that's, you know, started in America, albeit by a Welshman. But he was a Welshman who had lived in the US for quite a while. He was making the game for his American girlfriend, and so it was American spellings that went in. And of course, when the New York Times bought it, it was American spellings that stayed. But yeah, so every time there's, you know, "humor," "tumor," "honor," any of those words without the "u", you'll get some mild griping on Twitter about it. In fact, I remember when it was "homer" that I remember particularly a cartoonist over here in Britain. Months later he was still tweeting about it saying, "I still haven't forgiven Wordle for 'homer.'" You know? And is it not? Oh, it ruined his streak.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah, those streaks matter. Or we get attached to them at least. Is … "homer" isn't as popular in Britain because baseball isn't popular in Britain? Is that why?
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah, baseball is not popular at all in Britain. although a lot of baseball phrases have showed up in Britain, like, you know, talking about stepping up to the plate or, you know, doing a home run. British people would definitely understand that, but the more colloquial talking about a homer was not as familiar. That said, there are some uses of "homer" in British English. They're just not very common uses. So, pigeon racers call their birds homers. There's a Scottish usage of the word "homer," which means a job that somebody does in somebody's home. So, like if you're a hairdresser and you do a house call, that's a homer.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh, that's fascinating.
LYNNE MURPHY
There are some uses of "homer" in Britain, but not everybody uses them. So it was a word that stumped a lot of people.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah. I'm not certain I would have thought of it. I'm not a big baseball fan myself. When I hear "homer," the first thing I think of is "The Simpsons," of Homer Simpson.
LYNNE MURPHY
Yep. That was a lot of people when they got the answer or didn't get the answer, the tweets that were going out that day were all "D’oh!" In a sort of very Homer Simpson way.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh, that's very clever. So, one of the things you said in the Zoom call we were on is that English is well suited for games with five-letter words, and I thought that was intriguing.
LYNNE MURPHY
I've become a little bit obsessed with it. So, I was thinking about how there is pretty much no position in a five-letter word where any of our 26 letters cannot go. I mean, that's a little bit of an exaggeration. There are three things you cannot do with five letters. You cannot have a word that ends with a J, a word that ends with a V, or a word that has Q as its second to last letter. But other than that, I've, you know, there are words with every, you know, you can have an A in first position, second person, third position, et cetera, a B in all those positions, a C in all those positions. So that makes it a really wide-open playing field. And if you compare Wordle with other word games with other word lengths. So there's Worgle with a G, which has six letters, which does use British spelling. So, you know, and today the answer was "honour" with a U, H-O-N-O-U-R. But you play, if you play Worgle, you will get Worgle two or three guesses. It's very rare to go beyond three guesses in Worgle with six letters. Because with six letters, the words are much more predictable. You know, so there are lots of words that end with “er.” There are lots of words that end with “ly.” There are lots of words that start with “re” or “de” or “in.” And so they get very, very repetitive versus the five letter words. We've got all these nice old English words that have lots of consonants together, you know, clump or stamp or, you know, lots, lots of consonants. We've got all sorts of borrowings from all sorts of languages. So, ""sheik" was one, s-h-e-i-k, was one that stumped a lot of people. We just said "voila" was another one. Words like "kayak" or, you know, "fjord," you know. Put all these letters in different combinations and make it just that little bit trickier to solve. So even though there are only 2,000 words that can be solution, that can be the answer in Wordle, and there are only less than 10,000 or around 10,000 five-letter words in the English language altogether that you can play in Wordle. They won't be the answer, but you can play a lot more words than will be the answer. What you can do with those words is really, really varied. Another thing is that in five letters, you can have one, two, or three syllables. So, if we were doing four letter words, you could only get up to two syllables, right? But because we've got that five, we've got so much more flexibility and so much more unpredictability about where those letters are going to go. So, it makes it fun, I think.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah, it's funny. I think that if you had asked me, I would have thought the one that has more letters, six instead of five, it would have been harder to solve. It would, because there's so many more places you could put letters.
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah, there are more words. And there's about 20,000 six-letter words, but a higher proportion of those end with "r" than the proportion of five-letter words that end with "r." And so where those letters can go is just a lot more limited in certain ways.
MIGNON FOGARTY
That is fascinating. And now you said that there are 2,000 five letter words you can play in Wordle, but I think you said there are 10,000.
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.
MIGNON FOGARTY
No, that's okay. So, can you play all, can you play all 10,000 in Wordle?
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah. Okay. So, the Wordle dictionary is much bigger than the Wordle solution list. So, you could put, so you can put in the word "xenic," X-E-N-I-C, into Wordle, and it'll tell you how many letters you got right, but that's never gonna be the answer to Wordle.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh. So, you can use those. Oh, so the solution list.
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah, is much smaller.
MIGNON FOGARTY
I imagine, do you know, did they do that? Because I mean, when you said that word, I was like, I would never in a million years have guessed that word, that's too hard. (laughing)
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you can also put in words like plurals, right? So, I could put in something like "barks" or something like that with an "s." That's never going to be the answer. There are no, you know, "s"-ending four letter words that have been made plural in the solutions, but you could play it and be told how many of those letters are right.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh, that's really, so is that, are those instructions buried somewhere on the site or did you learn that through some magical linguist place?
LYNNE MURPHY
Well, I mean, I suspected it when I started playing, that they weren't going to be filling it up with words that end with "s." Yeah, and that's why if you ever play the spelling bee, the New York Times spelling bee, which is another great word game, there's never an "s" in the spelling bee because to add in the words that could end in "s" is just makes things ridiculous. So, I suspected it, but then I got my hands on the word list, what are the solutions? And yeah, then I knew for sure.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh, that's really fascinating. So, do you play every day?
LYNNE MURPHY
Most days, you know, some days I forget and lose my streak. But yeah, and I started out, you asked before about my saying that English is particularly good with five letter words. When I started out, I was also playing it in Swedish, I mean, not Wordle, but the Wordle equivalents in Swedish and French, thinking this will help me with thinking about Swedish and French. But they're just not as fun to play in those languages. Well, Swedish has got nine vowels, and it's just a lot harder when you've got nine vowels to figure out what's the vowel in this word. So Swedish is a lot harder and French is a lot more boring because it does not have all of the different word shapes that English has. So, it does not have large numbers of complex consonant clusters at the ends of words and things like that. So yeah.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Do you think is that because English has borrowed words from so many different languages that it's just more varied? that you think that's why?
LYNNE MURPHY
Part of it's that, and then part of it I think it's also that we're probably more or less likely than French to nativize the spellings of those in certain ways, or the way that we nativize the spellings of those might be more fast-and-loose with spelling rules because English spelling rules are so unpredictable anyway. So [in] French spelling rules, there are a lot of silent letters in French, but when you see a "ch," you know pretty much how it's going to be pronounced. When you see an "s," you pretty much know how it's going to be pronounced versus English where things are a lot messier.
MIGNON FOGARTY
So that reminds me when I was talking to the people who do the spelling bee, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, there aren't really spelling bees in Spanish, for example, because it's just really clear how you would spell a word based or say a word based on its spelling.
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah, and that's why English is such a great language for spelling-based word games because there is just so much you can do with it and so much variety.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah, what's an example of a word you're talking about nativizing words in English? What's an example you can give people?
LYNNE MURPHY
Well, I mean, part of the problem with doing this as I don't know offhand what the originals would be, but you know say something like "kayak," right? Whether we're using "k"s happily because we use "k"s, but we're also happy to have the "c" stand for the cuss sound, you know, or "ck" to stand for the cuss sound, but when we take "kayak," we when we borrow "kayak," we just put k"s in there, it makes it look like a non-English borrowing and that sort of thing. If you were borrowing into a language with a more rigid spelling system, you know, you might have to say change those "k"s into "qu"s because that's how you spell the "k" sound in that language, or you might have to, you know, keep them as, make them "c"s because that's how you spell them in that language. So, English allows us to make some choices about how how we spell those things.
MIGNON FOGARTY
That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, so Wordle's been really interesting for me because I stopped playing a while ago because I developed this strategy that then I could solve it every time, and then it wasn't fun anymore. So, I got, I came up with four five-letter words that all had different letters. So, I covered all the words of the alphabet in four words, and I would just enter those four words in the first four spaces every time, and then whether I got anything right or not I just entered those words, and then by the fifth time, I could get it right every time. And so it took away the whole challenge, but then I couldn't go back to making myself do it the fun way either, since I knew there was a way to always win, basically. Have you heard of... Do you have thoughts about that?
LYNNE MURPHY
Well, I think, I mean, I expect to win. You know, I never expect to lose at Wordle at all. You know, and I have, you know, two or three times, but I go in expecting to win. And so what I'm always trying to do is to keep my average down. So, and I think a frustrating thing about the New York Times interface is it tells you how many you've succeeded in getting it in four guesses or three guesses or five guesses, but they don't give you your average. You do have to figure that out yourself. But, you know, my aim is to get further and further away from four and further and further closer to three. So, there's that. I also amuse myself by, you know, my starting words. So that keeps it a little bit fresh for me. So last year, I just, I always did a starting word that made me think of my day. You know, if it was a day that was, well, I wouldn't, I was going to say if it was sunny, I would do "sunny," but I wouldn't because that's got two ends. But if it was overcast, I might start with "cloud." If it was my birthday, I might start with "gifts." I'd do something that would make it interesting to me and then see, could I still do it in four or fewer if I changed my word? This year, my New Year's resolution was to use the word "grand" more, because I love it when Irish people say things are grand all the time. And it was just a silly New Year's resolution. The only thing I've succeeded in is I always start Wordle with "grand." And now I'm seeing how that changes my game. So, you can find other ways to have …
MIGNON FOGARTY
That is grand. I love that. Those are good ideas to make it more interesting or meaningful or to pick a word that has some meaning. Maybe not focus so much on just winning.
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah, it makes it interesting. So, if you're interested in words, it makes it interesting to think about how has choosing this word changed my experience of the game today.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Nice.
LYNNE MURPHY
Very nerdy.
MIGNON FOGARTY
No, I love it. I totally love it. It's grand. It's grand.
So, I want to wrap up, totally switch gears. Well, first, let's take a break for our sponsor, and we'll be right back and we'll talk about this amazing thing about British English.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Okay, we're back. Thank you so much, Lynne. So, Lynne also has this amazing blog called "Separated by a Common Language." Did I get that right?
LYNNE MURPHY
Yep.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Is that?
LYNNE MURPHY
Yeah, correct.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Okay, it's "Separated by a Common Language." It's about American English and British English. It goes back as long as the Grammar Girl podcast goes back, maybe longer. And I stumbled across one of your very old blog posts the other day that blew my mind. And that's the beauty of this sort of evergreen content that we both do, it's relevant, you know, 15 years later. So, can you, so British people, they say "um" and "uh," just like American people do, but they just spell it differently. And my whole life I thought they were saying "er," because of the way it's spelled. Please talk about this difference.
LYNNE MURPHY
Well, I mean, it's again about spelling, you know? So, I mean, I'm not going to say they say exactly the same vowel sound as Americans do when we pause, you know, it might be a little bit different. But yeah, they're not saying "er" and "erm" when you see "erm" or "er" in a book. And I discovered this, I mean I'd lived here for seven years when I had a baby here, and when I had a baby here I watched a lot of subtitled television. And that's when I discovered it because the people, the American people on "Scrubs" or whatever it is I was watching in the middle of the night, were saying "um," and it was being subtitled as "erm." because that's how you spell the pause sound in British English. Because in British English, in most British Englishes, or most English Englishes at least, you don't pronounce an "r" after a vowel. So that "r" there is not signaling "er," it's signaling the quality of the vowel before. So, it's not "em," it's "ehm." So that's all it's doing. And related to that, I'm currently doing, I've been doing research on the word "please" for a long time. And last week I was doing some research on when you say, "Puh-lease."
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh yeah.
LYNNE MURPHY
Right, that kind of exasperated "please." And I was looking in internet corpora, so collections of text, to see how are people spelling this. and Americans will spell it "P-U-H, lees," very often, few other ways, but mostly P-U-H and the British writers were spelling it "P-U-R lees."
MIGNON FOGARTY
With an "r," man.
LYNNE MURPHY
So, the same thing. So, they're not saying "pur-lees," they're saying "puh-lees." It's just the way you spell it.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Wow, I would never in a million years put an "r" there. So, it makes me think of, I'm trying to think of an example. And I remember reading that the British are more likely to use "further" than "farther," because "farther" sounds a lot like "father" in British English, because they don't pronounce the "r." Is that correct?
LYNNE MURPHY
I don't know if that's why they don't use it as much, but British people are generally not taught a "farther," "farther, "father," I'm sorry, "farther-further" distinction. And so it's not something that people worry about here.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh, interesting. That's interesting.
LYNNE MURPHY
There are a lot of rules that Americans learn as, you know, don't write this, don't say this, or say it this way, not that way, that are just completely foreign to British writing and British editing. And that's …
MIGNON FOGARTY
Huh, I would think it would be the other way around because people view Americans as so much more permissive, typically.
LYNNE MURPHY
You would think that? But anybody, any British author who's been edited in America knows, knows that this is the way it is. So, so many authors I've spoken to who complain about that American editor turned all my "which"s into "that." That's a huge complaint by British authors because it's not a distinction that's maintained in Britain as much.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah, so—Do you feel like there are the same number of rules generally, and they're just different? Or do Americans just have more ticky-tacky weird little rules?
LYNNE MURPHY
I think the difference is that in Britain, what really matters is your accent. And that doesn't come out on the page. So, if people are going to be judgmental about language, they're usually judgmental about spoken language. And so with grammar, there's a linguist named Linda Pellier who's done some studies on how American editors and British editors work differently. And she's found that American editors, they know the rules. They can recite things from Strunk and White or things from the Chicago Manual or things like that. They know their rules. Whereas British editors tend to edit by ear. Does it sound right? And not think so much about the rules. So where British people can be very judgmental about pronunciation, Americans are very judgmental about grammar. And that's where we make our differentiations a bit.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Amazing. Thank you so much. I'm going to have to have you back to talk about more of these amazing things in the future. For now, we'll wrap it up. Again, Lynne Murphy, author of "The Prodigal Tongue." You should buy this book. It's amazing, if you enjoyed our conversation. And thanks, Lynne. Thank you so much. It's been grand to talk with you today.
(laughing)
LYNNE MURPHY
Thanks so much. It has been grand.