Wortel: Afrikaans version of Wordle to leave you guessing for good

Word game fanatics will be happy to know that South African developer Francois Botha has just launched an Afrikaans version of the ever-so-popular Wordle and as per the statistics reported by Azure, the game is already receiving 11,000 visits per day.

Botha has compiled and hosted ‘Wortel’ – the English Wordle’s counterpart – and says from the feedback he has been getting, the Afrikaans version is more difficult. This might be because Afrikaans words can have several consecutive and repeating vowels, which rarely happens in English.

The code for ‘Wortel’ is hosted in Github, which automatically adopts the changes Botha applies where he is hosting the game on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. He is currently not running Google Analytics or any other tracking code on the game and says he is uncertain whether he would have to get the user’s consent for browser cookies to do so and would like to keep the site clean as it currently is.

When the English version, Wordle – which was bought by the New York Times for an undisclosed amount “in the low seven figures” earlier this month – had everyone caught up on words, Botha thought it would be great to have the same game in his mother tongue, Afrikaans.

‘Wortel’ was developed by using an open-source project called React-Wordle, which Botha was happy to come across as he had limited time to write a Wordle clone from scratch (although he would have enjoyed the challenge). React-Wordle helped him to get an Afrikaans version of the game online sooner. He therefore had more time to focus on developing an Afrikaans word list for the game, which he says was the hard part.

READ: Twitter suspends spoiler account for ‘Wordle’ answer reveal

Botha explained to MyBroadband that the game needs two wordlists – one of five letter words that are accepted guesses, and another for the word-of-the-day. Through trial and error, he ended up using LibreOffice’s Afrikaans dictionary, which also came with its challenges as it only included singular and non-diminutive forms of words.

Then, he came across an accompanying file containing various Afrikaans language rules in the Hunspell format. He wrote a simple program to generate every five-letter sequence of characters from “aaaaa” to “zzzzz” and ran it through the Hunspell engine while keeping only valid words. Although the game can probably still be improved, Botha says at least the wordlist won’t hold the game back.

He is still figuring out how to handle characters like ‘ê’ and ‘ë’, so for now he avoided those kinds of words like “geëet”. The target word also won’t be plural or diminutive. Players can therefore currently guess ‘geeet’ even though it isn’t spelled like that, but it won’t ever be the solution.

Botha has generated a random wordlist for the word of the day and merely ensures that the solutions are reasonable before putting them in the game.