Previously in this space, I examined word games such as Boggle, Bananagrams, Scrabble, and of course the hot new thing, Wordle. Since then, the Wordle phenomenon has taken on new dimensions, with an astonishing array of variants, copycats, and homages. There’s Lewdle, which is Wordle but for “dirty” words. There’s a host of Wordle variants that play on the same format, only with geography rather than lexicography. There’s Airportle, which requires guessers to figure out the right three-letter airport code. There is the nearly identical pair, Worldle and Globle, which require you to guess the country based on a map shape and feedback about where your guess is relative to the correct answer. Most recently, I discovered Heardle, which gives you the notes of a song, first just a second, then more and more, until you guess it. It selects bad songs, but it’s a fun idea.
There are the variants that multiply Wordles you have to answer at once in a grid: Dordle (double Wordle), Quardle, Octordle, and the genuinely unwieldy Sedecordle. Sedec-, in case you don’t memorize such things, is the prefix for sixteen from the Latin. Number words are hard. Hectares aren’t named for the Greek for six ordinal places, hect; they’re named for hekaton, the Greek number 100. It is an area equal to a square with 100-meter sides. The Old Testament book Deuteronomy gets its name from deuter, for twice, making it mean “second law” or “repeat.” God’s “ahem.”
Hexadecimal, the common term for base 16 systems computer programmers use, is a linguistic error of hybridism, as hexa is Greek and deci is Latin. Such prefixes are challenging to keep straight. Look through a chart, and you will notice there’s something of a system in place, and you will learn things you already nearly knew, such as novem meaning ninth. Nevertheless, it is before our 11th month because of the two months one Julius Augustus added for his glory.
Semiannual and biennial mean twice a year and every two years. But biannual means the same thing as semiannual. In The Simpsons, Springfield has a Bi-Monthly Science Fiction Convention (Bi-Mon-SciFi-Con), which the characters struggle to remember, whether it is twice a month or every two months — since there is a Simpsons joke for every subject. Merriam-Webster, in its usage notes, very nearly jokes about how absurd this is too: “Look up the adjective biweekly in this dictionary, and you will see it defined as ‘occurring every two weeks AND as ‘occurring twice a week.’ Similarly, the adjective bimonthly is defined as ‘occurring every two months’ AND as ‘occurring twice a month.’ For this, we are sorry.”
Semantics is the study of a word’s meaning, whereas syntax is the study of how words relate to one another and form grammatical structure. Lexicography is the practice of compiling dictionaries, and lexicology is the supersubject under which all the other ones fall, the study of words. The word etymology, as we use it to study the facts of words’ development, means etymologically, the study of true or actual senses of words, from etymos for truth. The term thesaurus, for a reference book of words and their synonyms, comes from the publication of Roget’s in 1852. At origin the word means a treasure house, hence its figurative usage for a repository of language. The funniest Wordle variant to try and fail to beat is indeed Semantle, whose introductory rules explain, “The game will tell you how semantically similar it thinks your word is to the secret word. Unlike that other word game, it’s not about the spelling; it’s about the meaning.” This game makes one think about words not in terms of their letters or their constituent parts, such as hexi and deci, but in a whole new way. It’s nearly impossible.
