The game Wordle has taken the internet by storm, with millions of players tuning in daily to solve the simple-yet-challenging puzzles. Over time, players are finding better strategies to play the game, leading to improvements in daily and comprehensive attempts.
For those out of the loop, Wordle is a free word game that can be played on any web browser. It tasks players with guessing a 5-letter word that changes daily, eliminating possible letters from the alphabet as players use them. Because the first word a player guesses can be integral to their success, one of the biggest questions since the game launched is what words are the best to start with.
After Wordle went viral, TikTok users took notice of the popular word game. One user decided to use his own expertise to improve his Wordle play. Using his computer science skills, crvlwalnek figured out the most optimal word to start the game with after seeing TikTok user linguisticdiscovery claim the best word was "irate."
To figure out the best starting word in Wordle, crvlwalnek started by looking into Wordle's source file and finding the comprehensive word list. He noted that by using the console a player could easily find the answer for the day before copying the word list over to a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file. This then allowed him to program a script that would take all the words and calculate the frequencies of each letter and score the words based on letter frequencies as well as the order the letters appear in.
After the program completed, it put the words in order of best to worst, and the word that scored the best was the word "later," followed by the words "alter" and "alert." To his credit, lingusticdiscovery's analysis was very close to the best possible word, as "irate" was scored as the 5th best word to start with. The other words in the top 10 include "arose," "stare," "arise," "raise," "learn," and "renal."
Now that this knowledge is public to players, the competition to see who can complete the daily word in the least tries may become more competitive. For those seeking to gain an edge over their opponents, players can turn to other word games on the internet and mobile devices that allow more than one game per day. However, players need to be aware of Wordle fakes and rip-offs flooding the internet. For those ready to tackle the daily challenge, they need only look up "wordle game" on their devices to join in on the fun.
Wordle is playable on PC and mobile devices.