What the hele?

I’m a fan of word games, especially ones like Scrabble and Boggle (both trademarked, of course), and anagram games like Text Twist. So I was pretty happy to try out a version of the anagram game where you have to find as many words as you can from the given letters, and the words power a cute little train. This game is called Text Express 2, if you want to try it. I feel like I should warn you that you may find it slightly frustrating, as I did. Usually I’m very good at these games, so when I got the letters H U L E N E, and I tried to find the 6-letter word, I was stumped. This was the very first word in the game. It got to the point where I actually had to look up the letters in an anagram finder to work out that the only 6-letter word possible was the 16th century word unhele. This is an obviously obsolete word, meaning to uncover or reveal something. It is also the same as the obsolete word unheal, which means misfortune, not to re-sicken someone.

So I guessed that this game was somehow using the broadest English dictionary possible (there were a lot of other words I simply supposed might be words from the logical arrangement of letters). Then, I wasn’t allowed to submit gay, tit, fag, or faggot, but I was allowed to submit faggoty, which as far as I can tell isn’t even a real word! At least the former mean happy, a type of bird, cigarette (coll), and bundle of sticks.

In conclusion, I am not happy with this game. It allows obsolete words no normal person would know, but it doesn’t allow potentially offensive words which also have mundane meanings. It is pretty fun making the little train chug along, though. Give it a go and let me know what you think!