This is the 6-letter word game.  It works like this:  One person is "it".
  That person thinks of a six-letter word.  It must be a real, English word,
  which can be found in some dictionary.

  Other players try to guess the word, and their guesses must also be real,
  English words.  The person who is "it" scores the guesses according to how
  many letters in the guess match those in the word he's thinking of.  So for
  instance, if the word is "spring", then the scoring might go like this:

  waffle  0  (no letters in common with spring)
  cranny  1  (both cranny and spring have n as the 5th letter)
  apples  1  (both apples and spring have p as the 2nd letter)
  string  5  (string and spring match in 5 places)

  etc.  The game continues until someone guesses a word, and then that person
  becomes "it", and the whole thing starts over again.

  Complete rules are in ~rcurl/letter.match .  A list of all words used
  throughout the history of the game is in ~rcurl/l.m.words .  It's customary
  for the person who's "it" to store a list of all the current guesses in a
 file
  called letter.match in his or her home directory.  So for instance if kentn
  is "it", the guesses so far will be in ~kentn/letter.match .

1103 responses total.

I'm thinking of a six-letter word which is not
castle 1 (lastword)

This word is not an everyday word, but should be readily known to anyone with
a high school education.

Puzzles Item 162: Six-letter word game, 10th edition, has been linked
to Language 115.

teepee

teepee 1 (gelinas)

tender

ornate

tender 0 (aruba)
ornate 2 (blaise)

(I'm now maintaining a letter.match file)

Thanks Paul.  Kent and I recently switched our programs to put six-letter
scoring into a file called letter.match6 instead of letter.match, for
consistency (and because blaise was doing it that way and we couldn't give
a good reason for sticking with the old name).

preach

(My reason: Because I saved it with that name, and I'm too lazy to change it.)
 
preach 0 (aruba)

(Something to keep in mind: The plural of this word, when found, would make
an excellent guess for the seven-letter game, if that still hasn't been
found. I was feeling vaguely uncreative. >=} )
(Don't read too much into this clue, btw, it's more of a clue for the
seven-letter game.)

streak

streak 0 (albaugh)

minute

minute 2 (aruba)

refuge

refuge 1 (gelinas)

sprite

sprite 2 (aruba)

zygote

zygote 6 (blaise)

Blaise is up.

(btw, any benefit that word have given to the seven-letter one has already
been used up =} )

zygote has been used before in a previous 6-letter game. Grep
~rcurl/l.m.words. (This is for information only and does not carry
any implication of fraud, cheating, or poor bowel habits.)

sorry. =} I thought it felt familiar, but figured that may just have been
because it's a common guess.
 
Then again, I don't know that there are rules against reiterating a word, so
I'm not sure why I'm apologizing.

Yes, why are you apologizing?

I said I wasn't sure. =P

OK, actually the clue helped me with this one...
I'm thinking of a word that's not...
  zygote  0  (lastword)

teepee

  teepee  0  (gelinas)

yellow

  yellow  0  (kentn)

ambles

broken

  ambles  1  (gelinas)
  broken  1  (brighn)

ankles

bubbly

ruckus

  ankles  1  (aruba)
  bubbly  0  (gelinas)
  ruckus  0  (kentn)

artful

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