Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Game development.

Did you play my first HTML5 game, a word game called worDrop?

10,000 people already played it, but that’s not the point. Since I am planning to make more word games, and since every word game must have a words list, witn an ajax call I recorded every word submitted in worDrop.

It’s time to share with you some stats, I think this will help you in developing of word games.

Possible words list

You can find information about the possible words list in the post the basics of an HTML5 word game, have a look at the word list I used:

Word length	Number of words	%	Storage size	%
2	106	0.08%	212	0.02%
3	1082	0.84%	3246	0.33%
4	4437	3.44%	17748	1.79%
5	9614	7.46%%	48070	4.83%
6	16185	12.56%	97110	9.77%
7	22869	17.75%	160083	16.11%
8	26226	20.35%	209808	21.11%
9	25627	19.89%	230643	23.20%
10	22703	17.62%	227030	22.84%

I used words with a maximum length of 10 letters, and I am calculating the storage size multiplying word length by the amount of words with such length.

Now, let’s see the words made by players, to see if they match the total word distribution in some way.

Submitted words list

I am afraid things change a bit:

Word length	Number of words	%
2	0	0.00%
3	46966	52.51%
4	30370	33.96%
5	7808	8.73%
6	2753	3.08%
7	1024	1.14%
8	407	0.46%
9	85	0.10%
10	22	0.02%

I did not allowed submission with less than three letters, and as you can see, more than 95% of the words submitted are made by five letters or less.

This means the 95% of the game can be played with less than 7% of the storage (five, four, and three letters words). Even if you include six words letter, covering the 99% of the combinations played, you stay around the 15% of the total storage.

This is a very interesting data in my opinion, because it allows to reduce the number of matches when checking if a word exists, and also reduces the size of the data type to store the words.

Just to give you another couple of statistics, here is the list of the top 10 words:

1 – tea
2 – rat
3 – die
4 – eat
5 – tie
6 – war
7 – red
8 – zoo
9 – ear
10 – day

They all are three letters words. To find a four letters word, we must look at #37 with “door”, while the first five letters word is “queen”, ranked #101

Considering these data, would you make a word game with words with a maximum length of 5 or 6 words?