Wordle has a grid with no clues at the beginning of the game. You can choose to make the first move or not. What are you going to say?
There are a few things that are clear. It is strategic to use five different letters, and you probably want most or all of the five to be common letters in the English language.
Everybody has their own preferences and that leaves a lot of possibilities. Audio and ADIEU will get you off to a good start if you want to. TRASH would be a good starting point for someone who would prefer to knock out as much vowels as possible. One way to screw strategy is to throw in whatever word is in your head at the time. We were on strike and I used UNION every single day.
Computers have been hard at work on calculating the mathematical properties of certain words, even though only trial and error can tell you what you want. There are only so many five-letter words that a computer can think of to come up with a solution. A lot of obscure words were left out of the solution list.
Each time you guess a word, the original word list has been divided into two groups, one based on what you know and the other on what you don't. If you guess plant and get a green P, we know that it's possible, but not SPARE.
It's possible to score a word based on how well it narrows down the solution space. The kind of problem computer scientists love is a difficult problem to figure out if you have solved it correctly. All Wordle games can be solved in five guesses or less with the right strategy according to a recent paper by MIT. Here are their picks for what to say first.
The New York Times used a less intensive approach to come up with their favorites.
A good starter is just one of many things. What are you going to do with your next guess? A tool is included in the MIT paper to help you find the next word. The matching row of colored blocks can be found on page 14. You can solve the puzzle quickly if you play the word it tells you.
I was able to confirm that the chart narrows down the possibilities very well. At the moment, wordleopt.com isn't loading for me, but the authors say they've created a website for even easier use.
The problem with this approach is that it's not always the best word to narrow down your options. Even though the puzzle accepts Ghyll as a word, it won't be a Wordle solution. Is your goal to win? It's a good idea to guess obscure words that narrow down the possibilities. If your goal is to win in as few guesses as possible, you might want to give yourself more chances to get lucky. The earliest you can solve a problem is on your third move.
A starter that is both a valid word and a second guess that also meets starter criteria is something I like to use. I started with ARISE recently. Touch might follow that up. By the time I played both, I had information on nine of the 12 letters, including the next most common letter after those. 34% of my Wordles have been solved in three guesses or less, according to my statistics.
Tell me what you think is the best starter word. What factors were used to pick that one?
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