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about moby-dordle
7,000 of the words in Moby-Dick are used exactly once. Can you figure out where? Guess the chapter in which the word appears.
The game helps you zero in on the right chapter by telling you whether the chapter number you guessed was too high or too low, and eliminating chapters accordingly.
More of the surrounding paragraph is revealed after each guess. You have six guesses.
There will be a new Moby-Dordle each day.
Josh Wardle’s Wordle, John Turner’s Redactle, and Counterwave Games’s OMBY are gratefully acknowledged.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his
broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had
reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there
to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all
the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only
all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before
him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel
eating in them, till they are left living on with half a
heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been
from the beginning; to whose dominion even the
modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds;
which the ancient Ophites
of the east
reverenced
in their statue
devil; — Ahab did
not fall down and worship it like
them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All
that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of
things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the
brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all
the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had
been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.