This is inspired by Wordle by Josh Wardle and a tweet by everyone's favorite internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch.

Some linguistic notes: English has many dialects and idiolects with various pronunciation differences. While these variants are all valid and important, for this game to work some standardized pronunciation needed to be chosen. I took the following steps to create the word list for this game.

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict) is a pronunciation corpus for North American English. CMUdict is written using a system called Arpabet. I used an open-source mapping from into IPA.

I filtered the IPA CMUdict to find words that were represented by five IPA characters. I then further filtered the list such that the written version of the word also appears at least once in the Brown corpus. Since both datasets have been normalized to lowercase, this results in some proper nouns being included in the word list.

Report bugs or feedback here. (Maybe don't look at the word list file in that repository if you want to avoid spoilers).