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Wordle Game

A popular game in which you have to guess a word using several attempts to find out what letters it contains. Compete with your friends and find out who is the smartest of you!

Frequently Asked Questions

I found a question on a Random Word Generator game on the question and answer site StackOverflow.  The question contained a small runnable version of the game code.

The author’s question was: where to find large English word lists on the internet?

Getting this large list of words would add good game replay value to the game and potentially make it a lot more compelling for the end-users.

I thought that the questions its small and readable code contained many interesting that I could expand upon.  I could use it to learn how python language randomness for users to interact with. I could also use it to extend other features of the game around the word list to make it more robust. 

The StackOverflow question was entitled Random word generator- Python.

Motivational Example Word Game 

Here’s the runnable code of the game:

import random
 
WORDS = ("python", "jumble", "easy", "difficult", "answer", "xylophone")
word = random.choice(WORDS)
correct = word
jumble = ""
while word:
    position = random.randrange(len(word))
    jumble += word[position]
    word = word[:position] + word[(position + 1):]
    print( """ Welcome to WORD JUMBLE!!! Unscramble the leters to make a word. (press the enter key at prompt to quit) """ )
    print("The jumble is:", jumble)
    guess = input("Your guess: ")
 
while guess != correct and guess != "":
    print("Sorry, that's not it")
    guess = input("Your guess: ")
if guess == correct:
    print("That's it, you guessed it!n")
    print("Thanks for playing")
    input("nnPress the enter key to exit")

You can play it interactively here:

The game randomly chooses a word from a list. Then it jumbles or scrambles the word by changing the order of letters in it. The code does this by randomly choosing a number that is 0 to the length of the word -1. This is then used as an index. The word is then   The game user is supposed to figure out what the correct word is when the letters are unscrambled. 

After that, the user unscrambles the letters to make a word. The user inputs this guess by using the keyboard and pressing enter. If the user unscrambles the word incorrectly then they are required to keep guessing the correct word. Once the user guesses the correct answer which is python then the program prints "thank you for playing". The game ends when the user presses Enter to exit the game.

In the second line of code, the author of the question just pulls in a couple of words that are hardcoded into the answer.   I found some word lists, optimized the randomization and retrieval of word lists. I also cleaned the word lists for any inconsistencies in type or formatting.

How to Get Word Lists

The StackOverflow question about where to find word lists had multiple answers. The response that was marked as the answer by the author, contained a 1000 word list from the word list called word lists – MIT . The author of the answer showed how to read the word list by making a web request or reading it from the hard drive. 

The author did not integrate this with the code that the StackOverflow question. Since this was not done, I decided to implement a web request function that pulled in the word list resources and read them and a file IO function.  

Some of the word lists were in from plain text files and others were from files that contained a byte type.

There was a collection of word lists here:

•  I used the 100 word list from word lists – MIT.
•   Natural Language Corpus Data: Beautiful Data – This word list has data fromthe most frequently used word list from 2008 to 2009. These word lists also show how many times the words were used. 
• This is a good list for kid grade levels second grade spelling word lists up to eighth grade. This could be useful if the game is designed for kids. I decided to make this code the default so I could more easily guess and test what the words were.

    I saw a couple of other word lists that I chose not to use because they’d require scraping from the web, were proprietary, or did not seem as comprehensive. There did seem to be other good word lists on Kaggle.

Adding Value to the Game

One of the most fun parts of going through this coding exercise was adding additional features to the game. I added code retrieving the word lists. I also added a feature that enforced a set degree of randomness that I determined was necessary to have the unjumbling of the word to be challenging.  

I also added value to the game by 

• Adding Game settings
  • The settings  MINIMUM_WORD_LENGTH = 5 and MAXIMUM_WORD_LENGTH = 7 to control the size of the words that the user can guess
  • The words from file were a flag to decide whether or not the word list was from the file or from a web request.
  • The user could also choose 

#GAME SETTINGS
MINIMUM_WORD_LENGTH = 5
MAXIMUM_WORD_LENGTH = 7
WORDS_FROM_FILE = False
WORD_LIST_TO_USE = "THIRD_GRADE_WORDS"

• Creating functions so the code was more testable. This can be seen throughout the code
• Cleaned up the words in the word list so they could be read in if they were bytes or strings 
  • This MIT word list was in a file format that when read was in bytes. Other word lists were in strings.  The code was changed so it could convert the word that was in bytes into a string so it could be jumbled. I modified the code so there were separate functions that could easily be tested by me for the proper conversion of strings to bytes.
  • Some code had additional characters like numbers or extra characters. I used a regular expression to remove these extra characters.

def format_words(words):
    if len(words) > 1:
        words_pattern = '[a-z]+'
        if type(words[0]) is bytes:
            words = [re.findall(words_pattern, word.decode('utf-8'), flags=re.IGNORECASE)[0] for word in words]
        else:
            words = [re.findall(words_pattern, word, flags=re.IGNORECASE)[0] for word in words]
    words = [word for word in words if len(word) >= MINIMUM_WORD_LENGTH and len(word) <= MAXIMUM_WORD_LENGTH]
   
    return words

• Making it easy to swap between word lists by adding a dictionary

 if WORDS_FROM_FILE:
        words = get_words_from_file(WORD_LIST_FILE[WORD_LIST_TO_USE])
    else:
        words = get_word_list_from_web(WORD_LIST_WEB[WORD_LIST_TO_USE])
    words = format_words(words)

• Made sure that word was jumbled to a degree that made guessing fun
  • I added a sequence matcher code that enforced a certain percentage of randomness in the word. It did so by looping through the code 
  • There was code added to make sure that the word was jumbled to a certain degree. If it was not then the word was jumbled again. Here’s how a SequnceMatcher works SequenceMatcher in Python. A human-friendly longest contiguous &… | by Nikhil Jaiswal | Towards Data Science

def generate_unique_shuffled_word(word):
    while True:
        shuffled_word = shuffle_word(word)
        simliar_percent = SequenceMatcher(None, shuffled_word, word).ratio()
 
        if MINIMUM_WORD_LENGTH >= 5 and simliar_percent <= 0.5:
            break
 
    return shuffled_word

Full Code

import random
import requests
import re
from difflib import SequenceMatcher
from pathlib import Path

#GAME SETTINGS
MINIMUM_WORD_LENGTH = 5
MAXIMUM_WORD_LENGTH = 7
WORDS_FROM_FILE = False
WORD_LIST_TO_USE = "THIRD_GRADE_WORDS"

WORD_LIST_WEB = {
  "MIT_WORDS": "https://www.mit.edu/~ecprice/wordlist.10000",
  "NORVIG_WORDS": "http://norvig.com/ngrams/count_1w.txt",
  "THIRD_GRADE_WORDS": "http://www.ideal-group.org/dictionary/p-3_ok.txt"
}

WORD_LIST_FILE = {
  "MIT_WORDS": "mit_wordlist.10000",
  "NORVIG_WORDS": "norvig_count_1w.txt",
  "THIRD_GRADE_WORDS": "p-3_ok.txt"
}


def get_word_list_from_web(word_site):
    response = requests.get(word_site)
    words = response.content.splitlines()
    
    return words

def format_words(words):
    if len(words) > 1:
        words_pattern = '[a-z]+'
        if type(words[0]) is bytes:
            words = [re.findall(words_pattern, word.decode('utf-8'), flags=re.IGNORECASE)[0] for word in words]
        else:
            words = [re.findall(words_pattern, word, flags=re.IGNORECASE)[0] for word in words]
    words = [word for word in words if len(word) >= MINIMUM_WORD_LENGTH and len(word) <= MAXIMUM_WORD_LENGTH]
    
    return words

def get_words_from_file(word_path):
    file_directory =  Path().absolute()
    
    word_file_path = str(file_directory) + "\" + WORD_LIST_FILE[WORD_LIST_TO_USE]
   
    words = open(word_file_path).readlines()
    
    return words

def shuffle_word(word):
    jumble = ""
    
    while word:
        position = random.randrange(len(word))
        jumble += word[position]
        word = word[:position] + word[(position + 1):]
    
    return jumble


def generate_unique_shuffled_word(word):
    while True:
        shuffled_word = shuffle_word(word)
        simliar_percent = SequenceMatcher(None, shuffled_word, word).ratio()

        if MINIMUM_WORD_LENGTH >= 5 and simliar_percent <= 0.5:
            break

    return shuffled_word

def main():
    print(
        """
    	Welcome to WORD JUMBLE!!!
    	Unscramble the leters to make a word.
    	(press the enter key at prompt to quit)
    	"""
    )

    if WORDS_FROM_FILE:
        words = get_words_from_file(WORD_LIST_FILE[WORD_LIST_TO_USE])
    else:
        words = get_word_list_from_web(WORD_LIST_WEB[WORD_LIST_TO_USE])
    words = format_words(words)
    
    word = random.choice(words).lower()
    shuffle_word = generate_unique_shuffled_word(word)

    correct_word = word
    print(shuffle_word)

    guess = input("Your guess: ")
    while (guess != correct_word and guess != "" ) :
        print("Sorry, that's not it")
        guess = input("Your guess: ")
    
    if guess == correct_word:
        print("That's it, you guessed it!n")
        print("Thanks for playing")
  
    input("nnPress the enter key to exit")

main()

The version of the code is here on GitHub.

Conclusion

I learned about Python, different word lists, and implementing randomness for a user. Most importantly, I had fun coding it!

I hope you had fun reading and learning about it as well, and you picked something up from this simple piece of code as well.

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It is reported that the English Language has more than 170,000 words, how are we supposed to remember all these right? Let us put it this way, have you ever got stuck in a word puzzle or board games such as scramble? People with kids face these problems every day. From anagram sorting to word formation within given alphabets, parents break their head for all. Here are some websites at your disposable which address all these issues. We have listed not only the go to Random Word Generator Websites but also websites which aid in Dictionary and combining of two words.

You might also want to know websites to generate Random Addresses or to generate Dummy Texts as they are quite relatable to what you are looking for in this article.

See also: 11 Best Free Random Name Generator Tools 2023

What is a Random Word Generator?

Random Word generator websites generate words which are in use in social events, parties or simply to give your kids for word formation of words with meanings.

List of Random Word Generator Websites

Here is a list of 14 Random Word Generator Websites with exceptional range of words that it may provide and some additional features.

Wordgenerator

Word generator claims to have over 90,000 words; they also have medical terminology along with words that you would use in daily day to day activities. It also generates words for games like Pictionary and Charades, sentence and letter generators (which are also random) along with the usual nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

If you are looking to prank your friends, this website maybe the ultimate destination. It is rather a tiring task to make up words which sound pretty usable and normal.

This website also offers Fake words that can generate at random at the click of a button. The words seem like that it would be used in daily life, fooling your friends has never been easier.

Visit: Word Generator

Randomwordgenerator

A unique feature of RandomWordGenerator has to be that it generates random bible verse in addition to the common ones such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and phrases.

Like the previous generator, the number of words required can be specified, and you will have to click on the go button. This word generator can also be used when planning exercises or activities for kids and to aid them in learning English.

Visit: RandomWordGenerator

See Also: 10 Best Random US Address Generator Websites – TechWhoop

JimPix

You can take a chill pill and stress down with new words everyday, a tool that will help you sort out what words you want to use in a day.

A drop down list with a number of words can be used to help you find corresponding words. It has categories like common medications, verbs, collective nouns, brands, adjectives, countries, Dickens characters, Harry Potter spells, silly words, etc. The teacher, student or anyone who is in search of random words can restrict the length of the words by putting the number of characters.

Apart from these, it also offers social media names like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc. You can go ahead and experiment with emoji, fancy fonts, patterns, combinations, etc to have a better use of the random yet defined words.

Visit: JimPix

Textfixer

By default, TextFixer generates six words at a time, but the user can specify anywhere between 2-10 words to be generated at one time. This also is connected to other word generators which generate French words and German Words respectively. Other online tools  convert word to HTML.  They provide the same and HTML compression along with tutorials are also in offer by this website.

Their phrase interestingly states ‘We help you make web stuff‘. Which indicates their extended services which include generating domain names. Also band names and project names or whatever that are you are venturing into. Thus, a deserving spot on our list of Best Random Word Generator Websites.

Visit: TextFixer

Brightful Random Word Generator

This website, Brightful.me claims to have 10000+ words including nouns, adjectives for games and much more. Besides the fun aspect, this generator also seeks to help improve the English language of its users.

The randomness of this generator is beneficial for the new English speakers because of the variety of words it produces. One’s vocabulary can sure improve with every new word generated. It thus acts as a word-of-the-day teller, which can be used for knowledge. Also the adjective and noun pairings can be a great way to learn the parts of speech of the English language.

Visit: Brightful.me

palabrasaleatorias

What makes this unique and better is that along with generating random words, the meaning of the new word is also linked to Google/ Wikipedia in order for the viewer to understand it better. This tool also comprises a plethora of words for kids. Small kids can also benefit from this tool to find new words.

The website also offers services in 5 other languages other than English. Are you French, Italian or Spanish? Then use this website to become well-versed in your local language and increase your vocabulary skills.

Visit: palabrasaleatorias

The Game Gal

Missing a few Pictionary cards? Here’s a solution for your Pictionary game night! Designed especially for games such as Catchphrase, Pictionary, word-play etc, this word generator can be the perfect alternative to your physical board game.

In the Game Gal You simply need to select the game you are playing, the difficulty level and wait for the challenge! The difficulty level ranges from easy, hard and very hard words. As a result all age groups can play along!

Visit: The Game Gal

Word Tips

Word Tips is a Word Generator and word game solver as the name suggests is a really wordy tool! It is perfect to create words for games such as scrabble and crossword. This tool can generate all imaginable and possible words from the letters you have.

Whenever you’re stuck doing the Sunday crossword, use this tool to rearrange those letters into a full-fledged word.

The results of your search will be highly impressive and categorized into 4-letter, 5 –letter, 6-letter and so on words depending upon your search. So be it playing games, making anagrams or generating names – this tool can do it all!

Visit: Word Tips

Randomlists

RandomLists is a pretty standard word generator; it generates the number of words you specify every time you hit the go button.

This generator can be used when designing modules and exercises for kids to write an essay incorporating the generated words.

Visit: RandomLists

CreativityGames

CreativityGames is absolute fun if you are bored to death and are looking for engaging games to stimulate brain activity. Along with the standard word generating ability, it also provides a cure for writer’s block by tempting the person to use words in their writing.

It also has some pre-designed activities to help the use write stories using words it has randomly generated. This website also allows the user to use their analytical skills. It also aids in Pictionary and other word games; it also offers writing prompts.

Visit: CreativityGames

Watchout4snakes

Watchout4snakes is simple, efficient and fun! This random word generator is the most basic kind. With a simple interface and a single-button function, all one has to do is click ‘refresh’ to get a new word every time.

All you have to do is select a category, whether you want a random sentence, phrase, word or paragraph. Hit refresh everytime you want a new word, and that’s all there is to it!

Visit: Watchout4Snakes

Miro

Miro is a slightly more organized, work-oriented tool than the others mentioned in this list. For those who find brainstorming ideas a real help, this tool is a boon for you. Writers suffering from writers block or generating a business model – Miro can help formulate your ideas and words into a template.

All you have to do is feed in the random words related to your project, and it will organize it for you. Thus a flow of thought remains in the words you generate, and solves problems.

However, you can also generate random words for fun and play word-games with your friends.

Visit: Miro

Randomword

This generator is by far the most simple and user-friendly website for beginners. Randomword offers just one random word at a time with a short description of the word below. To view the next word, there is a giant button below the text which you have to click.

This generator is perfect for exercises or activities for kids and is hassle free. You can just link it. And let the kids make up stories with whatever number of words that is to follow.

Visit: Randomword

Word-grabber

The website offers to vary online tools to generate words which will aid in games like Scrabble and Pictionary. Word-grabber has specified tools for Scrabble online, and words with friends cheat. It also solves anagrams and crosswords.

Visit: Word-Grabber

Wordconstructor

This generator not only generates words but also domain names, names for companies or projects. WordConstructor also generates German words. You can switch the language in the option given on the page.

Rapscript

A tool that helps with generating new words for mundane activities. If you are someone who is finishing up an assignment or writing something for your journal or books, then this tool will help you give the best words out there.

This thrilling tool generates words in three skill levels, that is, Noob, Advanced and Pro. Select your skill level and feast upon words every second and increase your brain activity just for fun as well.

Visit: Rapscript

FAQs

Conclusion

So, this was our list of the best Random Word Generators of 2023. Be it a fun game night or learning a few new words everyday. These word generator tools won’t fail you. Make anagrams, do some word-play, play scrabble or Pictionary. Have fun using it. Cheers!

See Also: Top 5 Free Online Word Games to Improve Your Vocabulary