01 Feb, 2026

A few days ago, The new York Times (owner of Wordle) announced that from 2 February it would start reusing some words from previous years.

Their announcement started:

Hey, Wordlers! We have some exciting news to share

and continued

Starting on Monday, we will begin adding previously run words back into play. There are still many first-time answers to debut, but also more chances for Wordle in ones and those magical, serendipitous moments when Wordle overlaps with real life. Happy solving!

Firstly, whoever wrote this nonsense deserves an award for fake cheerfulness. There is absolutely no "exciting news" in that paragraph.

It has caused a bit of a stir in the Wordle Community. Many wondering why, and some suggesting they will now stop playing the dumbed down version.

It got me thinking

Are they running out of five-letter words? I've gathered the data and crunched the numbers, and here are my findings:

Firstly, I started with a list of English words. I've actually had a list for some time, and I knew one day it would come in useful. It contains 466,547 words: from aahed to zugzwang .

I then narrowed that down to five-letter words (22,949) before excluding plurals, which are not used in Wordle, and Proper Nouns (such as Paris, or March -- anything with uppercase first letter, but leaving "march" for example). The list was down to 10,784 words.

Finally, one more trip through the sausage machine. I put this list in a word processor and calculated how many spelling errors there were. This, roughly, would help me identify the more common five-letter words. I doubt many of us could use valew in a sentence.

We now have a more manageable potential Wordle list of 5,437 words.

The longevity of five-thousand words?

A word-a-day from that list would yield almost 15 years of daily challenges. Wordle has been running since October 2021. By my reckoning we have enough to run until 2036

NYT, Why?

So that does beg the question: New York Times - why start repeating?

#WordPuzzles