So I’ve played Wordle a handful of times by now. I’ve gotten lucky a couple of times after three guesses but so far haven’t needed more than four. After a couple of plays to get the feel, I found a list of the most commonly used letters:
E T A O I N S H R D L C U M W F G Y P B V K J X Q Z
and used an anagram website to find two five letter words that use the first ten letters. Removing the proper names we have:
- saint horde
- drain those
- drain ethos
- north aside
- satin horde
- horde stain
- thorn aside
- hoard inset
- heron staid
The most common starting letters are S C P D, so picking a word that starts with ‘S’ first probably makes sense, and there are a lot of words that end in E, so I’m going with ‘SATIN HORDE’ as the first two guesses.
The third word choice is harder. There are lots of three five-letter-word combos but none that use the most likely letters first, so using one of them would make it more likely to take four guesses. I eyeballed the remaining letters L C U M W F G Y P and found ‘CLUMP’. If it seems like I need to guess a Y to have enough vowels I might pick ‘LUMPY’.
To improve this, I should look at the letter distributions across five letter words only – ‘THE’ is the most common word and throws off the statistics. And I suppose you could extract the word list from the .js program and do some brute force analysis of all possible words, but that seems like cheating.
Dictionary Word Frequency
According to Wikipedia these are the most frequently used letters in dictionary words (not weighted by usage):
E S I A R N T O L C D U G P M K H B Y F V W Z X Q J
For the first ten letters I found ‘STAIR CLONE’ which starts with S and C and ends in E. For the third word, ‘PUDGY’ uses most of the next letters and has both a U and a Y at the end. I think I’ll try both approaches using “incognito mode” to see how they compare.