I updated the big ol' list of words and the big ol' list of phrases on the Phraser page.
- A couple of months back, I noticed that The Collaborative Word List Project was now free. I've used the C.W. List in Phraser for years, but didn't give it much "oomph"—I used is more as a tie-breaker to boost word scores a little instead of as a primary source of truth. I didn't want anyone to think of Phraser as a way to sneakily get free (albeit noisily distorted) access to to the C.W. List. But I no longer worry about that. So now I give the C.W. List (and other crossword-lists) more "oomph". The C.W. List doesn't get a ton of oomph, though. As I mentioned before, it omits spaces from phrases. This makes sense for crossword puzzles; POWERSOFTEN is a fine crossword "word." But for my purposes, I really want to know where the spaces are; so when my code sees a crossword entry that's space-less and suspiciously long, my code just kinda ignores it.
- David Turner (a.k.a. the guy who wrote Semantle) wrote another game recently. For this, he wanted a couple of word lists: legal words and satisfying words. (Kinda like how Wordle has two word lists: a list of legal guesses and a list of satisfying answers. Wordle will let you guess the word FIVES because it's valid English; but it's an unsatisfyingly rare word, so Wordle won't ever use fives as the answer.) This was relevant to my interests, so I piped up with some unhelpful "help." Through all my wanderings amongst word lists, I hadn't found one that recognized that "cat" is a good word but "iii" not so much, despite being three in Roman numerals. David came up with word lists and published them. So I grabbed copies and tossed them into my folder o' textfiles.
- I updated my copies of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and some fandom.com wikis. We must keep up with the world's changes. "Morbius" was phrase #695418 last year but now it's #337564, now that he had that movie and everything.
Feel free to download fresh files if you're into that sort of thing.
