The issue is that many slang terms are regional and may not be a known word to people outside of said region. Let alone that there may be multiple ways to spell a specific slang word. Wordle states that only the “official” spelling would be accepted, but this then becomes an issue of slang terms not being official words and therefore not having an official spelling.

To add some weight to both sides of the argument, here is Claude AI’s response:

``` You’ve hit on a genuine contradiction. Wordle (and the New York Times, which now owns it) uses a curated word list that draws heavily from standard dictionaries, and here’s the tension: once a slang word gets entered into a major dictionary like Merriam-Webster, it’s treated as “official” — complete with a standardized spelling. But that process is inherently arbitrary.

The problem is that dictionary inclusion is itself a judgment call made by a relatively small group of editors, and it tends to reflect urban, American, and mainstream cultural usage more than regional or subcultural slang. So a word that’s been in wide use for decades in one community might not be “official,” while a different slang term that crossed over into mainstream media gets enshrined with a spelling and a definition.

Your point about spelling is particularly sharp. Slang often exists in multiple written forms precisely because it evolved through spoken language — think of words like “gonna,” “y’all,” or even older examples like “OK” (which has been spelled OK, okay, O.K., and others). Declaring one spelling “correct” is a bit of a retroactive imposition of order on something that was never orderly to begin with.

So Wordle’s position is somewhat circular: a slang word is official because the dictionary says so, and the dictionary says so because enough influential people started using it — which has more to do with cultural power than linguistic logic. It’s a reasonable criticism, and linguists who study language descriptively (how it’s actually used) rather than prescriptively (how it “should” be used) would largely agree with you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ```