It's not cheating, it's strategy...
The most common letters in the Wordle
word list are s
, e
, a
, o
and r
. A good starter word that uses all
those is arose
. If you strike out completely then your next 5 most common
letters are i
, l
, t
, n
and u
. A good word that uses those letters is
until
.
If you didn't strike out completely but got one yellow letter then good words that use the next most common letters and the one you got right are:
s | e | a | o | r |
---|---|---|---|---|
lints | intel | tuina | donut | rutin |
If you got 1 green letter or more than 1 letter of any color then you are on your own. :)
Is using a strategy cheating? Wheel of Fortune gives contestants r
, s
, t
,
l
and n
because those are the most common letters. The idea is to skip by
those since they will be the first guesses. Also everybody knows you need at
least one vowel and there are only five of them. Using these characteristics
when playing Wheel of Fortune is an accepted part of the game. Is the same true
of Wordle?
To find our starter words we need a word list. What better list to use than the one Wordle uses? Since any word outside this list cannot even be entered as an option it seems like a good list. The file wordlist.txt is that list from the Wordle game itself.
We also want to avoid words that use the same letter more than once. Obviously those happen in Wordle but as our first guess if we re-use a letter it doesn't help us as much reveal letters that might be in use. Therefore we are going to remove all words that reuse letters from our wordlist. only_unique_letters.cr is a script to filter words that use a letter more than once.
Next we need to figure out what are the most common letters. Wikipedia some stats. It differs if we are considering texts vs dictionary. This got me wondering if the word list in Wordle (5 character words) also has a different distribution.
frequency.cr will scan a file for the most common letters
and output the most common. The top 10 (in order) are s
, e
, a
, o
, r
,
i
, l
, t
, n
and u
.
Now lets start figuring out our words. starter.cr is used to find words that include all our 5 most common letters. They are:
aeros
arose
soare
If we strike out completely then we want a word that uses the letters i
, l
,
t
, n
and u
. We again turn to starter.cr and get these
words:
unlit
until
What if we don't completely strike out? We get one yellow letter. Returning to starter.cr gives us our lists, one for each case where a single letter in our starter was was correct.
For s
there is a single word, lints
. For e
we have several words:
elint
enlit
inlet
intel
lenti
intel
is probably easiest to remember but the others may be useful if you
actually get a green letter and need the e
in a specific place.
For a
, o
and r
there actually isn't any words that use those letters and
the next 4 more common letters. But if we include the next 5 most common letters
the we get for a
:
inula
tuina
For o
we are still striking out. For r
we have the single word rutin
. To
solve o
we need to expand our most common letters again. Returning to the
frequency.cr script we ask for the 11th most common letter
which is d
. Now combining o
with our 6-11th most common letters and we
get:
doilt
donut
indol
lound
nould
tondi