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You’ve undoubtedly seen a grid of green, yellow, and black squares on any social media platform in the last two weeks. Wordle, a free online game that provides gamers with a new word problem every day, is the latest pandemic fad. Josh Wardle made it for his crossword-obsessed partner. Over 300,000 people play it daily. wordle solution
Players get six tries to guess a target five-letter word in Wordle. They are told which letters in their guess are in the word and in the correct location (green), and which letters are in the word but in a different position (red) each time they make a guess (yellow). It’s similar to the board game Mastermind, but there’s one major difference. All six colors were equally likely to appear in the target in Mastermind. Because all guesses and targets must be true words in Wordle, some letters are more likely to appear than others, making some guesses better than others.
This leads to a subject I’ve seen people debate for a long time on the internet: what is the best initial word to guess?
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For the time being, consider the “best first guess” to be the one with the most letters in common with the target term. What we need to know is how common each of the 26 letters are in English five-letter words. Not just any five-letter word, but those that are likely to be used as targets. wordle solution
There’s no need to use obscure terms like “nisus” (a mental or physical effort to achieve a goal) or “winze” (a connection between different levels of a mine).
We came upon a recent study that looked into the popularity of over 60,000 English words. For language scholars like me, this type of statistic is intriguing because it reflects something about how quickly a word may be processed: on average, more well known words are read faster.
We took all five-letter terms that were known by at least 50% of the people in the study (if you knew “nisus” or “winze” — which I didn’t — you’re in the top 7% of the group). Then we counted how many times each letter appeared in a word at least once.
The letter “e” was the most common, appearing in 46 percent of words. This is a well-known pattern that may be seen throughout the English language. The novel A Void by George Perec, for example, was written sans the letter “e” on purpose. In The Adventure of the Dancing Men, Sherlock Holmes used this pattern to decode a cypher made up of dancing stick figures by reasoning that the most common symbol would be “e.”
The introduction of silent e’s at the end of words in the 16th century, meant to convey anything about the preceding sounds, is one reason that “e” is so prevalent. The words “tone” and “tonne,” for example, are pronounced differently.
The letters “a,” “r,” “o,” and “i” and “s” tied for fifth place with 39 percent, 34 percent, 29 percent and 28 percent respectively. One word “arose” as the greatest option from these six letters right away! Do you want a particularly bad first guess? “Whump” is a good example (a dull thudding sound). By this metric, that’s about the worst.
However, while “arose” will almost certainly get you letters in the target, they may not be in the precise locations.
“Samey” is the greatest selection for a word that is most likely to get letters in their correct placements (monotonous, repetitive, unvaried). Let’s not stop there, though. We get a word that appears eyrie-ly familiar when we combine these ways into one final score: “soared” (a young hawk) — similar to “arose,” but with a more strategic sequence. wordle solution
One last point to mention. People had gotten into the source code for the Wordle website and discovered the actual list of words that can display as targets while writing. We decided not to use that list because we thought it would be more enjoyable to try to answer the question using the language resources accessible to us. Also, that list could change, so I needed a more generic response.
But, just to reassure you, when I combine all of the above with that list of “official” Wordle objectives, “soare” emerges as the clear winner once more. That’s all there is to it. It’s now up to you to decide what to do with guesses two through six.
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