It was the word “pshaw” that on popular app Wordle that broke the camel’s back for Denmark man Russell Hoffman, leading him to invent a Australian version of the game.

Aussie Words is a completely free version of the New York Times’ word game, and one that is completely free of the “Americanisms”, which Mr Hoffman said plagued the game.

“I’ve been playing five, six years, and it used to annoy the hell out of me when you come across a solution word in Wordle which I’d never heard of, but that’s because I’m not American,” he said.

“Words like maven (meaning trusted expert) which was completely unheard of to me.

“It’s pretty unsatisfying when you get it and don’t you know its definition, and worse if you miss out.

“And so I thought, oh, what am I doing here? Let’s do our own.”

Conversations with his friends and family convinced him the idea had merit and, armed with a Macquarie budget dictionary purchased from Morrisons Newsagency, he set about compiling a list of all five-letter words in it.

This exercise — which took about 10 days — ended with a list running about 5000 words long.

Then he really decided to lean into the Aussie idea and produced a list of about 500 slang words — the likes of bonza, bewdy, and rippa — to put into the app’s second mode, Daily Slang.

After that came development of the app, a concept for which Mr Hoffman, who spent his career working in logistics management for distribution, warehousing and transport centres, was alien.

Luckily his daughter and her partner knew a hack to kickstart the project.

“They’re both quite into AI, both with their jobs and just in a kind of interest type way and I said to her partner Blake, ‘mate, could that thing create an app?” he said.

“He goes, ‘just tell me what you want to do and we’ll do it’.

“So anyway, long story short, he showed me how to use Claude which writes the code, sends you a file with the code and you just get it hosted on Netify.

“It probably took me another two weeks before I was even confident enough to send it to friends and ask them to try it and then another six or so weeks after that before I got it properly public.

“I’m still making changes to it and testing and trying things.”

The website has a few hundred users and is completely free with no advertising.

Users can join groups with their friends and compete against each other, with rankings on a leader board showing average accuracy and daily streaks.

Mr Hoffman said he has had great feedback so far and hopes to get more people involved.

The game can be played at aussiewords.com