Percentage of Standard Words Found

[Gaye]

Would it be possible to show a percentage of the standard words found (not necessarily on the scoreboard)?  Although there is the summary of possible words etc before you start the game, I usually forget to take not and one challenge I set myself is to at least to try and find all the standard words.

Also just as a matter of interest is the middle letter randomly selected or is there an algorithm used to select it?

[Alan W]

Seems like a good idea, Gaye.

When I play Chihuahua, I aim, like you, to get all the standard words if I can, though it's not often I manage this. Having the non-standard words in italics means I can get a fairly good idea of how I'm going, but I don't know for sure until I check the solution the next day. A running count of how many standard words are yet to be found could make things interesting.

As for the middle letter, it's chosen so that the number of words in the puzzle falls within a certain range: there must be between 24 and 62 standard words, or between 40 and 85 for the Challenge puzzle. Also, the Challenge puzzle has a bias against nine-letter words ending in "ING". But given those constraints, the letter is chosen randomly.

In the daily puzzles to date, the most common mandatory letters, and the number of times they have appeared are:

E	114
I	97
N	85
R	85
S	75
T	75

Predictably, J, Q, X and Z have never been used. K was used 4 times and Y 5 times.