Skip to main content

Zen Word

I got a bit tired of the word unscramble games I had been poking at in between other things lately.  A while back I switched to Zen Word, which is very similar to the others (Word Collect and Word Trip), but it just has a more relaxing vibe.  Some app was also installing games when I never asked for them.  


Zen Word boots up with a little uplifting quote, and has short 3-line poems for each new "location".  The poems are not very good ... they have a good choice of words but only a few had a decent rhythm.  It's so easy to just start writing words and forget to read theam aloud to see how they sound.  If you can stick to the same number of syllables or accents per line, the result can just flow off the tongue rather than getting stuck in a bunch of extra sounds.  Others felt like they had translation issues.  But it was a nice feature, again going with the relaxing vibe.

The dictionary in Zen Word is better than the other two games.  It has full sets of Greek lettees and a few Hebrew ones, some more of the common shortened words like REPO, and a few more science terms (erg and bel and such), enough archaic/regional words (like KEN and ELD), and some fantasy/mythological words (ORC and ROC), though it's missing some foreign currencies (it has both LIRE singular and LIRA plural from Italy but not BANI from Romania right next door).  Oddly, KEN came up in an episode of Picard season one last night, when one of the Rios holograms was using what I assume was a Scottish accent.  I used to point out those kinds of words as good Scrabble words to Anne, now I call them good word search words.

Zen Word has the usual daily gifts and little competitions, and the usual track of extra bonuses that you can pay $$ to get a pass to get everything in the second column.  It has alternating features that swap out every few days: one has you finding butterflies (wit upgrades and unlocking new scenes) and the other is a little race of koi fish where yoou try to win five rounds before the other 5 random players.  The power ups are simple: a light bulb uncovers one letter for 80 coins, and the fireworks give you 5 letters for 240 coins.  Since each win in the Koi Races gets you 50 coins, you will soon be past the point where you would ever need to spend $$ on those.  The other bonuses are also fairly generous.

Zen Word is most similar to Word Trip.  In Word Trip, the locations are all countries, where Zen Word uses generic natural locations like "night" or "forest".  Word Collect generally asks for a lot more words per level, and it can be annoying getting stuck on the 18th word when it turns out to be some mix of letters you weren't expecting.  We enjoy playing Zen Word together, where we are flagged as being faster than 90% of players most of the time.

You can get it ad free forever for $4.99, which was worth it to not have the time-wasting ads, and never give the ads a chance to mess with settings or install things.

While these games may be wastes of time on the surface, there are words in my head like ORT (a small bit of food) that I would not have had bouncing around without these puzzle games to bring them out of hiding.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
2 comments
Read more

why not SQUUUSH?

There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things.  This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29.  SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHIER an
Post a Comment
Read more

RULY, RECK, and RobWords

There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not.  A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it.  I tried explaining it to Anne.  It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds."  It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here .  "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled.   It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong.  Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview.  I have been enjoying h
Post a Comment
Read more