It doesn’t include slurs, uses US-spellings (at least in the US), and intentionally doesn’t include “obscure” words, though obviously that’s a judgement call. (Spelling Bee has an email link if you want to dispute an exclusion — I believe I helped get “ichor” added to the list.)
Pupal and agora I really don't get. Maybe some uneducated players would think pupal was some dirty word (related to poop???), but agora has no negative association that I can imagine.
As for the other removed words, I think it's fortunate for the Wardle guy that that list was not publicized before it got bought. That would have created a firestorm and possibly eliminated his chance of the sale.
The word lists were (and are) in the site's javascript, readable for anyone who cares to look.
That is surely it, it is the only (negative) connotation and incident in culture.
(Upvoted for the info, which I'll bet is right. Christ.)
The self-circular nature of agoraphobia is fascinating to contemplate though :)
AGORA is a rarely-used word and is probably not in the dictionary referenced by The NY Times for their word puzzles.
PUPAL may be mis-perceived as a misspelling of PUPIL and frustrate players. I don’t know… I’m guessing!
Though, I'd expect these to be moved to allowed guesses, there's some very obscure stuff in the allowed guess list.
Probably just a first pass by whoever's in charge of standards. Now I'm trying to guess if this was a simple pass with an "approved words" list, or if there was a mind-numbing meeting where they spent a day or two looking at words.
That said, I'll never forgive American English for what it did to Aluminium. The word Aluminium just sparkles and glitters like the metal itself, whereas Aluminum has a distinctly cold sound, like an echo in an empty hall early on a winter's morning.
https://nytspellingbeeanswers.org/nyt-spelling-bee-answers-0...
The Wall Street Journal's puzzles are edited by Mike Shenk. For years - going back to when he was in college - he published puzzles under the name "Marie Kelly" (an anagram of "REALLY MIKE"). Then, one day, the people at crosswordfiend.com decided that was unacceptable - that potential female crossword designers would be put off by the fact that a man was publishing crosswords under a woman's name. And, obviously, we need more female crossword designers. As well as more female answers to crossword clues. And don't even think about publishing a crossword that has, say, FASCIST as an answer - they don't want to see such an awful word.
I wish I was joking.
Otherwise, yes, it should rarely be an issue.
None of them look great, intuitively. Actually it is kind of interesting, although unsurprising on second thought, that the removed words skew toward these harsh g and k noises which don't show up as much elsewhere in English. So they don't look like good first picks. But maybe at some point strategies will advance to having common second picks or something like that.
People can easily make a whole game panel of these word guesses, then post a screen shot on social media. Then cancel culture mob takes over.
* some words with negative connotations from the solution set
* slurs from the allowed guess set
As such, I believe there already weren't any slurs in the possible solution set. Or at least they weren't in the group of words which were mentioned as removed here. So, your scenario was already not possible.
I think removing the words with negative connotations from the solution set was a great move because, while they aren't slurs, there's no need to give people that negative experience.
Fibre, agora and pupal are a little esoteric. Not as much as many words on the SOWPODS list, but enough to perhaps be annoying.
Agora & pupal - probably the repeated letters? Or they are just too obscure.
No idea for fibre, but agora and pupal have repeated letters. Are there other words in the accepted wordlist with repeated letters?
That word is a common enough English word ... warning, this is a spoiler for a puzzle that should appear in about 5 years ... "mamma"
wench, slave, fibre, agora, pupal, lynch
And removed the following from the list of words that are accepted as guesses (in addition to the above ones):
gooks, darky, pussy, spick, spics, bitch, fagot, dyked, coons, spiks, sluts, dykey, faggy, homos, chink, dykes, lesbo, kikes, whore
Most of those I get, but why did fibre, agora, and pupal get pulled?