Sweeping the country like a Buffalo snowstorm, Wordle is a word game that has been celebrated in WSJ, NY Times, Slate, Smithsonian and many others.
It’s a sweet story of an engineer who wanted to make a fun game for his partner while she was going through a tough time. Mr. Wordle (real name Josh Wardle) and Mrs. Wordle (Palak Shah) created a simple word-guessing game that now has millions of daily players. He did the coding, she did the hard part of sorting through 13,000 five-letter words to find the 2,315 most recognizable ones used in the game.
The rules are simple. You’ve got six chances to guess a five letter word. Wordle gives you color-coded clues when you get a letter right - green if it’s in the right spot, yellow if it belongs somewhere else.
The immediate feedback makes it fun, and attracts one million new players each week.
I’m a little surprised that no one has done the mathematically accurate solution for Wordle’s human players, so I’ve written up my strategy below.
Currently, the solutions offered online are wrong, too simple, or too complex. Some focus on getting as many vowels as possible, recommending that you start with ‘adieu.’
Others suggest that when you find a correct letter, you should repeat it in your 2nd and 3rd guesses, building on your past success.
Still others demonstrate the best strategy for a computer to solve the game, but you’re not going to do combinatorial mathematics in your head, and it’s not really much of a strategy to suggest that you ‘optimize your decision tree to maximize entropy among the remaining word choices.’
My strategy is written for a human player, goofing around on their phone, looking for an advantage before their six guesses are up.
To help test the right solutions, I downloaded the most popular Wordle-style app from the App Store and tried out my strategies in real time.
First off, a good solution should be easy to follow, shouldn’t require a dictionary or reference materials, and should get you to the right answer every time.
Second, a good solution prioritizes revealing as many letters as possible. For a human player, knowing whether or not a letter is present in a word is almost as valuable as knowing its precise placement.
Third, it should maximize your chances of winning the game rather than trying to minimize your number of guesses. There are other “go for broke” strategies, but a good solution, in my view, should methodically march down the field to victory. Like Josh Allen, except for the last 13 seconds part.
Fourth, it should avoid relying on luck. With only 2,315 words, it’s inevitable that every day will see some lucky soul guess the correct word on the first try. That looks great on social media, but it’s not a strategy that you can repeat. Your chance of randomly guessing the correct word is less than 1/10th of 1%, so let’s stick with planning rather than prayer when it comes to Wordle success.
To increase your chances of winning, there’s really no substitute for the systematic approach: reveal as many letters as possible with your first three guesses. By getting 15 out of the 26 letters of the alphabet confirmed to be either in the word or not, you dramatically improve your chances to solve the puzzle.
This researcher used all of the words in the dictionary to count the frequency of each letter in the alphabet. Using this data, you’ll find that the fifteen most common letters are ‘eariotnlscudpmh’.
This led me to Radio, Clues and Nymph as my first three guesses.
They worked well, and I had some success with this trio as my go-to guesses.
But thinking about it a bit more, I realized that we are not trying to guess “any” of the words in the dictionary, but only the five-letter words. So using the frequency count for every dictionary word wasn’t exactly right.
And more than that, we are not trying to guess “any” five-letter word, but only the smaller list of 2,315 common words that Mrs. Wordle chose to be on the game list.
Making it easy for me, Mr. Wordle actually includes all 2,315 words right in the code for the page. If you view the source of the page, you’ll find the full list of Wordle-approved words.
So I calculated the letter frequency for each five-letter word in the Wordle-approved list - I’ll share the spreadsheet at the end of this post.
Based on that data, the single best first word to guess in Wordle is ‘orate’. These are the five most common letters in the Wordle list and as a first guess, it smokes out three vowels for you right away.
The next two words are…
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