About Emoji Cats Word Guess
Emoji Cats Word Guess is a fast, friendly, and fun word-guessing and language-learning game with a whopping database of about 150,000 English words, 5,000 Spanish words, 4,000 German words, and 5,000 French words. So many words makes for gameplay that is always fresh, and guessing one word at a time makes Emoji Cats Word Guess ideal for any time you’ve got a minute because you’re on hold, waiting in line, wanting to do “just one more thing” before starting something you’ve been procrastinating on, etc.
You might enjoy trying to guess a word as quickly as possible, or you might find guessing more slowly to be kind of meditative and soothing (tapping the letters can be kind of like popping bubble wrap 😸). In addition to exercising your brain by figuring out words and recognizing patterns of common letters and letters commonly used together, any time you get an unfamiliar word that you’re curious about, you can just tap it in the endgame popup to see its definition.
“Easier”, “Harder”, “Spanish”, “German”, “French”, and “Swords” dictionary settings
The words you get during gameplay depend on whether you’ve selected the “Easier”, “Harder”, “Spanish”, “German”, “French”, or “Swords” dictionary setting:
Emoji Cats Word Guess’s “Easier” dictionary setting uses a 2,726-word lightly-edited subset of the “New General Service List”, a public-domain list of “core high frequency vocabulary words for students of English as a second language” compiled in 2013 by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan, and Joseph Phillips. Ease of guessing will vary with word length and more common vs less common letters, but they will all be familiar words.
The “Harder” setting uses a 148,137-word lightly-edited subset of the public-domain “Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon” (ENABLE) word list — basically a Scrabble dictionary with the addition of words of more than eight letters as well. The “Easier” words are all here too, but you’ll also find lots of specialized terminology, obscurities, alternate spellings, and so on.
The “Spanish”, “German”, and “French” settings use lightly-edited subsets of BYU linguistics professor Mark Davies’ list of the 5,000 most-frequently-used Spanish words, Leeds University’s list of the 5,000 most-frequently-used German words. and BYU language professors Deryle Lonsdale and Yvon Le Bras’ list of the 5,000 most-frequently-used French words.
Especially if, like me, you’re learning Spanish and/or German (or, not like me, French 😸), and could always use even more occasions to work with Spanish, German, and/or French core vocabulary words, give these settings a try! The endgame popup doubles as an enhanced flashcard for language learning – just tap the word to see its definition, usage and historical information, and for many words even be able to hear the pronunciation.
Re “lightly-edited”: First, I only included words equal to or fewer than 12 letters long, and with no apostrophes or dashes, as a user-interface decision, and second, I didn’t include things (for example slurs and diseases) that you wouldn’t really want unexpectedly popping up in people’s faces during a word game for a general audience.
The “Swords” setting uses a 150-word dictionary of types of swords plus names of named swords both real and fictional, as a bonus feature for anyone who would see “emojicatswordguess” and want to parse it as “Emoji Cat Sword Guess” in addition to “Emoji Cats Word Guess”. 😹 ⚔️
If you’d like to see the counts of correct guesses you’ve gotten so far in each of the six categories, tap “Your stats” in the drop-down menu.
Thanks for playing Emoji Cats Word Guess!
Emoji Cats Word Guess began its life as a from-scratch “take home project” as part of qualifying for onsite interviews at a top tech company. I thought that both the project and the resulting onsites went very well, but unfortunately I didn’t get picked for the job. 😿
However, I had really liked (and gotten compliments on during the interviews) the “any type of user interface is acceptable” user interface I had come up with, including using emojis because the time constraints made it impractical to create my own graphics. And post-onsites I found myself continuing to pick up my phone and play a few rounds while waiting for a web page to load, app to build, etc.
So I decided to give the game a new life as my second published app (after researching and editing dictionaries for it to use in place of the company’s API). I hope you enjoy Emoji Cats Word Guess too, and again, thanks for playing!
Tané Tachyon
Tachyon Labs