Wordle

Unless you are hiding in a cave, you must have come across the green yellow and black blocks being shared across social media. The game itself is not new, but it probably went viral due to the sharing feature, which lets you feel clever about having achieved something that is worth showing off without revealing what it is – which is clever indeed of a feature!

To cover the basics again – we are looking to guess a common five-letter English word by making guesses and sharpening them by seeing which letter occurs in the answer at the right place, or at some place.

**Warning: below is sort of a spoiler.**

The common strategy is to make a good first guess and then figure out what should be next guess. You may have noticed that there are some words better as a starting guess than others, as they contain more common letters (for example: rates, adieu, raise).

I came across another strategy and then fiddled around, to cover more letters in first few words and then bother about guessing. In other words, a breadth-first search rather than the more intuitive depth-first search. In this strategy, you burn the first few guesses to cover as many common letters as you feel comfortable doing. So the optimisation becomes to cover most common letters across 2 or 3 words. Disclaimer – this does not work in ‘hard’ mode where it has to be a depth-first search after you have some clues.

This Wired article lists letter frequencies across books and across dictionary words. This can be redone for five-letter words but probably does not achieve much. Let’s continue with the assumption that common letters are roughly as per the sequence in the article : E A R I O T N S L C U D… I am surprised about the lack of P in that, and appearance of D before M, but there is a rather famous quote I have not done the homework for.

I was intuitively inclined to add P, M and probably followed by Y, H. If you are keeping the count so far, we are at 12 + 4 letters, exceeding 3 words of choice by a letter. So we must give up on one of them and try to form 3 words (or 2 for 10 letters search) to scan the widest.

For a single guess anagrams of RATES look best to me. ADIEU is also a good start for a vowel-first search. But when doing this over more words, I found it harder to avoid letters from first word into second if we start with best-first-guess. The Wired article does list TARES+CHINO but I think struggles on 3rd guess to avoid overlap while still trying to maximise inclusion of common letters.

Amit’s tweet listed AMPLE+TUNIC+WORDS and I started to think about my own sequence of guesses. I think keeping S and R for 3rd guess is a bit of waste – though it was sheer curiosity that I started looking for my own list. I tried to fiddle around to come up with following additional sequences that cover 15 letters total.

TAPER+CHINS+MOULD : my favourite, I think H is better than Amit’s W in first 15

TAPER+CUMIN+BOLDS : Though B a bit of dud and keeps S in third guess

NOTES+BRAID+PLUCK : Though K a bit of dud

MIRES+PANTY+CLOUD : not much against it, but M a bit of waste in first guess

There is also RATES+CHIMP+LOUND which probably is a better sequence. While Wordle accepts LOUND as a word, I doubt it is commonly thought as one. YOUNG is a more common as 3rd guess instead but then G is perhaps not that common.

Is there a 4th word worth inserting here? I am inclined to say no. For one, it becomes far too dependent on the clues from first three i.e. too fragmented from here. Secondly, letters can repeat and are likely to repeat from the rather common ones covered already. Also, there are only 2 guesses left afterwards if you burn 4 guesses for breadth.

Anyway, I guess I have sucked some joy out of your playing. Some of the above guesswork could be done more scientifically by coding (for example this for first word) but I did not want to suck more joy out of my own time !

You can fine tune your own best sequence by playing unlimited wordle here or reverse guessing your friends’ answers. Do write your favourite sequence/s in comments.

Until then, check out other cool stuff around wordle – Pictle, Wordle in Paint, or making patterns.

Update: It seems P & M are actually behind D, and could even be slightly behind H & Y. Few better choices are:

RATES+COLIN+DUMPY/HUMPY/BUMPY

RATES+COULD+HINKY

RATES+INDOL+CHUMP

or my new favourite: STORE+DAILY+PUNCH/MUNCH/BUNCH !

Tags: Wordle