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Show HN: Heardle Is a Phonemic Wordle (heardle.glitch.me)

3 points by JoshMandel ↗ HN
Snowy weekend project with my partner who studies speech production.

Five-phoneme words can be long or short orthographically, which keeps the gameplay interesting. We designed this to be playable for folks (like me) who don't know IPA, but this is also a great excuse to ping the linguist in your life.

Powering the interface is CMUdict, a great and openly licensed source of pronunciations (though it doesn't include all inflected forms, which leads to some gaps in the allowed word list).

4 comments

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transfire
I like it. But something is up with the dictionary. It said that “blank” and “blink” weren’t in the dictionary.
JoshMandel
Interesting. Any chance you're accidentally transcribing the en sound as "n" instead of "ŋ"? This is an easy mistake to make, and perhaps one we could recognize proactively to display a more helpful error message.

To double check: if you type the word "blank" into the text entry box at the bottom of the screen, you should see it automatically transcribed (i.e., automatically "blæŋk" should appear in the grid).

FYI, the underlying JSON file derived from CMUdict is at https://github.com/jmandel/heardle/blob/main/words.json (it's, uh, 10MB, but it's hosted from a CDN that supports gzip encoding so "only" takes one megabyte to send over the wire.)

aterris
Cool! This is actually way over my head, but sent it to my wife (who studied linguistics) and she thinks its amazing.

Been fun/interesting seeing so many of the wordle mixups popping up.

JoshMandel
Yeah, I've really enjoyed the "remix culture" around Wordle. Gives me strong and positive vibes from an earlier stage of the Web. (And Glitch is a gem -- it made real-time collaboration from across the dining table a breeze).