From time to time, I get a difficult word that I’ve only learned after a long struggle. This time, though, I know it. Confidently I type the answer, only to see to my horror, just after I’ve pressed the enter key, that I’ve made a small typo. My score is reset to zero. It will take another five attempts and at least two weeks before I can call this word my own. Can anything be more annoying?
Well, we fixed it! Anytime your answer differs just a little from the correct answer, we’ll assume that you made a typo, and we won’t hold it against you in the scoring.
We do this using a very cool algorithm called Levenshtein Distance. It calculates how many letters you have to add, remove or change to get from one word to the other. For instance, if you type “langugage”, the Levenshtein Distance to “language” is one, because you’d need to remove the second “g”. Going from “language” to “lengua” takes two deletions and one change, for a distance of three, and “language” to “inglua” takes five steps.
So, if the Levenshtein Distance between your answer and the correct answer is small compared to the length of your answer, we’ll be forgiving. We hope it will save you much frustration!
