octokatherine
commented
2 years ago @ckjpn
aahed, aalii, aargh, abaca, abaci, aback, abaft, abaka, abamp,, abaya, abbas, abbes, abele, ables, abmho, abohm, aboil, aboma, aboon, abris, abuts, ...
none of those words are in the answer list.
That list has already been manually filtered down to common words. If there are specific words from that list that you think should be removed, you can open an issue or PR.
The problem
Words like the following, which are currently part of the game, are not in a lot of native speakers' active or even perhaps passive vocabulary, so the game may not be so fun, and would be particularly difficult for children and those speaking English as a non-native language.
aahed, aalii, aargh, abaca, abaci, aback, abaft, abaka, abamp,, abaya, abbas, abbes, abele, ables, abmho, abohm, aboil, aboma, aboon, abris, abuts, ...
A possible solution
To keep this more game-like, with more successes, limit the words to higher-frequency words.
A possible list
Here is a possible list of words.
Though a much lower number of words, there should still be enough words to make it challenging and fun.
I choose these words from the headwords of the NGSL. (http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/)
This list could be expanded by adding the other words in the same "word family" for each of these.
File 1: 468 words - All are headwords from the NGSL File 2: 603 words - An additional list with some words in the same word families. Note that this would need to be cleaned up a bit because it contains items such as weren (from weren't), haven (from haven't), and maybe more.
NGSL 5-letter words.zip