Penis-Hymen

Long before Wordle was a thing, my family played a group game that started out awkwardly called "The Five Letter Word Game", but eventually came be known as "Penis-Hymen".

Each player as Guessee (can be played by a single person, as a Guessor) chooses a five-letter word with the following constraints:

1. No proper nouns
2. No repeat letters
3. In the common language of the players

Each player as Guessor then offers up guesses. Importantly, guesses are not similarly constrained (except for #3). Importantly, the Guessee only indicates how many letters in the guess occur in their word. No hint of placement was given or expected. The winner is the Guessor who successfully guesses their Guessee's word in the fewest guesses, but you're never limited to 6 guesses.

We… loved this game. Played at family gatherings, played it on car trips, played it over text messages. I used an implementation of it as the basis for a talk I gave for a local Python Users Group.

I've been playing the daily Wordle for a while now, and it increasingly aggravates me how willing the Wordle editors are to violate #2. I don't know whether Wardle's original Wordle implementation ever used words with repeating letters, but I encounter it multiple times per week under the New York Times.