Corrections and Updates

This page records substantive corrections and updates to articles on The Verbarium, newest first. Typing errors are fixed without a note. A correction here means something we published was wrong or out of date: a count, a verdict on a word, a claim about how the game works, or a historical statement. How we check our figures is explained on how we check words, and you can report an error through the contact page.

14 September 2026

A second full check of every figure and source on the site, run against the exact word list the game loads, found the following errors in published pages.

Vowels in order (words with no vowels): The page said four words contain A, E, I, O and U once each in alphabetical order. There are six: the adverbs facetiously and abstemiously also qualify.
Word origins (where our strangest words come from): Details of the routes into English for shampoo, bungalow, kayak, boondocks and ketchup were corrected to match the Online Etymology Dictionary, and uncertain points about taboo and tsunami are now marked as uncertain. Dictionary links now point to the entries that were actually checked.
Dates in the spelling essay (why English spelling is so weird): The scholarly letters in debt, doubt, receipt and indict, and the S in island, were dated to the 16th century. The sources place these respellings between about 1400 and 1600. The account of Caxton’s “eggs” story was also corrected.
Word notes (real or fake quiz): Several short origin notes (gobbledygook, gardyloo, crwth, absquatulate, mumpsimus, zeugma) were corrected or qualified. All forty verdicts were already correct.
Webster’s spelling reform (color or colour): The article credited the American spelling to Webster’s 1828 dictionary. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates Webster’s change to his 1804 speller revision and 1806 dictionary.
Wording about scope: Statements such as “no word”, “the longest” and “only” on several reference pages now say explicitly that they describe the game’s word list rather than every English dictionary.
Offensive-word blocklist extended again: The check found vulgar words and slurs that the blocklist still missed, and the blocklist was extended again to cover them. It now blocks 281 entries of the source word list, leaving 172,446 playable words, and every count on the site was recalculated on the updated list.
Boggle round length (how to win timed word games): The page said Boggle gives three minutes a round. The current Hasbro rules sheet for Boggle Classic uses a 90-second sand timer and describes three-minute rounds as the traditional way to play. The section now follows the rules sheet and cites it.
1v1 rules label (play page): The 1v1 Live screen described a match as “best of 3 rounds”, which suggests a match can stop after two. All three rounds are always played. The label now reads “Three 60-second rounds, same letter for both players. More words wins the round; more rounds wins the match.”

13 September 2026

On this date we rewrote and restructured the site’s articles, tested the game directly in a browser, and rechecked every figure against the word list and blocklist the game uses. That work turned up the following errors in previously published pages.

Accented letters (the words you can’t play): The page said accents could not be typed and made no difference. Testing showed the game removes accented letters before checking, so café is read as caf and rejected. The answer now says to leave accents off.
Apostrophes and hyphens (same page): The page said an apostrophe could never be typed. It can be typed, but the game removes it, so can’t scores as cant and co-op as coop.
The Adventure deadline (how to win timed word games): The three-phase plan assumed every round lasts sixty seconds. In Adventure mode the round ends when the bot finishes, at 55 seconds on level 1 and about 31 seconds on level 20. The article now explains how to scale the plan. The game’s start screen, which also said “in 60 seconds”, was changed to show the real deadline.
1v1 match rules (the play page): The how-to-play text described 1v1 as “best of three”. A match always plays three rounds, a tied round scores nobody, and a match can end in a draw.
Offensive-word blocklist and every count on the site: Earlier figures counted the full word list, including words the game refuses through its blocklist, and one older article listed a blocked word as playable. All counts now describe words the game actually accepts. The blocklist itself was extended twice on this date to cover slurs and explicit forms it had missed, bringing the number of word-list entries it blocked to 262 at that time; articles were recounted after each change.
A comparison of three-letter words (hard letters Q, X, Z and J): The article said C has fewer three-letter words than W. Both have 36. The sentence now says C has the same number as W and fewer than E or G.
Letter totals (how we check words): The total for P was given as 14,549, which did not match the word list at the time. All letter totals on the page were recounted.
Letter frequency (Adventure mode, tested and the hard letters guide): The letter table came from a simulation, so Q, X, Z and J were shown as coming up once in every 160 to 162 rounds. The exact figure from the game’s weights is once in every 163 rounds for each, and the hard letters guide now says S, C or P come up about forty-five times for every X, not forty.
A search example (how to win timed word games): The illustrative S round was said to reach seven openings by the halfway point; the words listed reach eleven. The count of word families with -s, -ed and -ing forms is now described as a rough letter-matching count.
The blocklist message (the words you can’t play): The page said “That word’s not allowed here” means the spelling exists in the word list. The blocklist is checked first, so the message also appears for blocked spellings that are not in the list.
Dataset description (how we check words): The page was changed to separate the 172,727-entry source list from the playable list (then 172,465 words), to give playable figures next to source figures, to state how many spellings the blocklist file holds and how many of them are in the source list (then 392 and 262), and to add a fingerprint that identifies the version of the list.
Consolidated articles: Six shorter articles were merged into fuller ones: the Q, X, Z and J letter pages into the hard letters guide, the silent-letters article into why English spelling is so weird, and the vowel-heavy words article into words with no vowels. Their old addresses redirect to the new pages.