Puzzle gamers all over the world were stumped by the sudden arrival of Wordle, a guessing game where players check if they can guess a five-letter word in just six tries. Thing is, players only get one Wordle a day, and while players can always repeat their attempts, failing the entire set can get quite frustrating for fans.
Thankfully, word game savants can find a lot of creative ways to guess today's Wordle in as few tries as possible. With statistics, word frequencies, and smart guesswork, players can score their Wordle of the day much faster than their friends. How should players approach this, though?
Updated July 9, 2022, by Rhenn Taguiam: With Wordle serving as one of the most exciting day-to-day word challenges around, it makes sense for some players to want a head start in solving a Wordle puzzle. Aside from giving up and searching for the Wordle solution itself, there’s actually a way to use tactics and strategy to make the most of the game’s six tries. Some efficient strategies include grabbing a word list, taking note of some letter combinations, experimenting with letter orders, and relying on good ol’ fashioned taking notes.
14 Get A Word List
One of the most efficient ways of solving a Wordle puzzle is to actually acquire a nifty list of five-letter words. That way, players will be able to have a more accurate resource of potential words they could use to solve the puzzle.
Websites such as Best Word List are a reliable source of five-letter words, which players could use to make more reasonable word guesses. When paired with other clues such as smart starting words and the like, a word list can become a godsend and help players solve their Wordle puzzles much faster.
13 Stay Alert For Same Letters In A Word
One of the most annoying properties of a Wordle puzzle isn’t necessarily the word being complicated and confusing. Rather, some words tend to be difficult to solve because the answer to the puzzle uses one letter multiple times.
When players encounter an “O” or an “E” in a puzzle, there’s always a chance of that letter having a repeat. Likewise, consonants such as “S” and “L” may be victims of this tricky situation as well. Players need to stay sharp for potential words that use these letter combinations.
12 Experiment With The Letter Order
When players start getting the right letters but find them in the wrong order, there’s always the risk of wasting tries when using these letters improperly. However, players may be surprised to realize that there’s actually a way to make use of these letter guesses more efficiently through the right letter order.
Essentially, players may want to try to position guessed consonants on the start and end of word guesses. Likewise, vowels almost always end up as second or fourth letters in Wordle puzzles. Knowing these intricacies can make solving Wordle puzzles more practical.
11 Type It, Write It Down
Considering how players only have six guesses to solve a Wordle puzzle, players should be extra careful when solving puzzles. Instead of having a mental image of the words they’re using as guesses, they may have an easier time typing or even writing down their guesses instead.
At its core, it all has to do with being able to see one’s progress physically in order to free up processing space in the mind. After all, having a reliable list of words to choose from means that players can just think of words and type them down, and then only make a more decisive guess afterwards.
10 Form Words With Commonly-Used Letters
The first guess is often the most important word in any round of Wordle, and it may help to apply a bit of strategy whenever thinking of the first word to use as a guess. Interestingly, it might help to apply some linguistics when thinking of such a word. Essentially, it may help to form a first guess using the most common letters in the English language.
According to studies, when ranked, the order of the letters in the English language from most commonly used to least-used are E, T, A, I, N, O, S, H, R, D, L, U, C, M, F, W, Y, G, P, B, V, K, Q, J, X, and Z. It’s important to note that this alphabet was the basis of Samuel Morse’s Morse code, who observed typesets used for printers. Players of Wordle may want to form words using letters that are extremely common.
9 Understand Letter Frequency In Word Games
While players may already know the most frequently-used letters in English print, statistics tend to be slightly different in the context of word games. In the same Lexico by Oxford source, it says word games may not focus on common words but rather letter frequency.
The 2004 version of the Concise Oxford Dictionary has this list of common letters in English words: E, A, R, I, O, T, N, S, L, C, U, D, P, M, H, G, B, F, Y, W, K, V, X, Z, J, Q.
8 Eliminate Vowels First
Considering the most common letters in the English language, one might notice that all the vowels are in the top half of the list. Moreover, save for U, all the other letters are in the Top 10, with E being the most commonly used letter in English words. Since there are five vowels in the alphabet, being able to determine whether they are used in a Wordle puzzle drastically gives players better odds.
As such, more experienced puzzle players realized it may help to find words that use as many vowels as possible as their first guess. This also explains why “ADIEU” makes for such a good first word, considering it already uses four of the five vowels.
7 Use Distinct Words For First 2 Guesses
It’s very rare for players to get a Wordle puzzle in two guesses unless their initial word has probably given them three to four letters to work with. In the case of a first guess not being of too much help, then more adept players should focus on securing a completely different word as their second guess. Here are some principles to follow:
- If the first guess didn’t secure any letters at all, then the second guess should be a completely different word.
- If possible, the second guess should use any leftover vowels the first guess didn’t use. This ensures the player will know if any vowels are used for the current puzzles.
- If there are successful yellow letters in the first word, players should try their best to use these letters in the second guess but in a different place.
- If there are successful green letters in the first word, players should try their best to incorporate them into the second guess.
6 Remember The Statistics
Fans of Wordle who want to ace their puzzles might also use the power of math on their side. Folks from the Art of Problem Solving observed various Wordle puzzle results and noticed some statistics that puzzle-lovers might want to use to score that daily word. Here are some things to keep in mind when guessing:
- First Letters: S, C, B, T, P, A, and F seem to be the letters that appear the most in Wordle puzzles. S appears in over 15-percent of current Wordle puzzles, while the others appear in more than 5-percent of the same word sets.
- Second Letters: A, O, R, E, I, L, U, H appear the most common as second words, with their presence in 5-percent of current Wordle puzzles.
- Third Letters: A, I, O, E, U, R, N appear commonly as third letters. They’re mixed up with a lot of the frequent second letters.
- Fourth Letters: E, N, S, A, L, I, R, C, T, O appear in more than 5-percent of Wordle puzzles as their fourth letter. It’s interesting to note that one out of seven Wordle puzzles had E as the fourth letter.
- Fifth Letter: E, Y, T, R, L, H, N, D appear in more than 5-percent of current Wordle puzzles as the last letter.
5 Skip The Correct Letters In The Second Guess
Players who score correct letters in their word, no matter the form (yellow/green), might be better off skipping those letters in their second guess. This might sound counter-intuitive, but doing this gives players more room to find information about the rest of the letters without wasting time on letters they already know are there. For instance, in the same Wordle puzzle example (Wordle 229, 2/2, SHARD):
- Using Correct Letters: ADIEU and DOGMA use the same AD (Yellow) in both guesses, with no additional letters revealed. By the third guess, players used 10 letter slots but only got six unusable letters and two yellow letters figured out.
- Skipping Correct Letters: ADIEU and SPORK didn’t use any correct letters from the first guess, and instead used completely different letters for each guess. By the third guess, players used 10 letter slots and got six unusable letters, two yellow letters, and two green letters.
4 Find Go-To Words
Of course, knowing the most common letters in both the English language and existing Wordle puzzles can be fun but it’s not exactly easy tinkering with all of them to find applicable five-letter guesses. Interestingly, players can actually solve the puzzle easier by combining the most common consonants with as many of the vowels as possible to find the go-to first words for their guesses.
As per the Art of Problem Solving, here are some of the best starting words that secure two common consonants and three vowels on the get-go: ROATE, RAISE, RAILE, SOARE, ARISE, IRATE, ORATE, ARIEL, AROSE, and RAINE.
3 Cross Out One Letter At A Time
Players out of luck may resort to just random guessing, but there’s a way to make random guesses in Wordle more worthwhile. At its core, it helps to try and guess words by eliminating letters from the alphabet slowly. Players stuck on the third guess would have letters already crossed out, so the variables are already in their favor. Here are some additional tips:
- When guessing with yellow letters, move them from the first letter option and think of potential words that fit them. Afterward, they should do the same thinking but with the yellow letter in the second slot, and so on. This makes guessing much more organized.
- Don’t ignore the greyed letters! This means they’re not present in the current word, which eliminates a lot of unnecessary thinking space on the part of players.
2 Words Rarely End In S
It’s quite a surprising tidbit to learn that Wordle words are actually handpicked. Based on observations by the Art of Problem Solving, current Wordle puzzles only end in -S 2-percent of the time. Moreover, the letter S also ranks 15th when it comes to the last letter options in current puzzles.
Given this fact, it also means plurals aren’t extremely common in Wordle either, so players shouldn’t resort to plural words as a guess as much as possible. Avoiding S as the last letter would eliminate a lot of unnecessary guesses on the part of the players.
1 Try Even If It Looks Wrong
Players might have a hard time thinking about their Wordle guesses especially if the words they’re thinking of “sound” wrong in their head. However, it’s important to remember that Wordle only registers a word as a guess if it’s a valid word from the dictionary.
As such, players can mash in as many guesses as they want and the game won’t accept it if it’s not a real word. This makes for an interesting strategy, as players can actually make “random” guesses of five-letter combinations and end up with a real word they may not have even heard of.
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