The New York Times Has Added Its First New Word to the Wordle Answer List!

Today, we look at how the New York Times has officially added a NEW word to the Wordle answer list for the first time.

Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of pop culture history that interests me that doesn’t quite fit into the other features.

A while back, the New York Times assigned a specific editor to Wordle whose job it was to now pick the words that would be used as answers each day. This was normal enough, all it meant was that she would mix up the order of the answers from the pre-arranged (when the game was first released) list of future answers, choosing words that she felt would work better next to each other (you know, avoiding the same type of word two days in a row, and giving her the opportunity to do themed words on occasion for holidays).

However, the list was still the original list of possible answers, just with a few words REMOVED by the Times that the newspaper felt were not good possible answers (like FETUS or LYNCH). That, though, has now been thrown out the window!

SPOILERS FOR THE MARCH 27, 2023 WORDLE!

The New York Times has now officially added a brand-new answer to the Wordle answer list, and it was, of all words, GUANO. It’s a very odd word in general, but it’s an especially odd word to specifically ADD to the Wordle list when it was not part of the original Wordle answer list.

As my friend Chris noted to me, this was a shock to the sense of the more statistically-minded folks out there, as he explains “this displeases me and anyone who likes to use coding/statistics/information theory to play with wordle, because your stats depend on knowing the list of possible answers. And it appears we don’t anymore.”

And all for GUANO, of all words.

Weird.

If anyone has any pop culture bit that you’d like me to discuss, drop me a line at brian@popculturereferences.com.