What are bonus words?

Modified on Tue, 14 Nov, 2023 at 12:30 PM

Bonus words make the game more approachable — if every English word in a puzzle were required, the puzzles would be extremely frustrating for people who like to find every word.

Squaredle's primary focus has always been on American English, but regardless of a player's country or region, there will always be words that someone is more familiar with than others, and vice versa. Many things in life can expose people to words that others without similar experiences might not know.

We start from an American English word frequency list, so infrequently used words are typically bonus words. We also check a few dictionaries to see if words are categorized as dialectical, archaic, or obsolete. Finally, we use our judgment, our own experiences, and comments from friends and the Squaredle community to determine whether enough people are aware of a word to make it required, including a voting system in our Discord chat server to see if more people feel they should be bonus rather than required.

We try to err on the side of "bonus word," since if you don't know a required word, you have to brute-force the puzzle to find it — which isn't very fun.

For more info on how we decide whether a word should be required or bonus, please see How do you determine bonus words? in the FAQs, and you can read more about Michael's thought process in The Making of a Squaredle.