My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

My strategy is to never use the same start word, I like using a random word each time as that changes the path to solving. I might pick a random word from another open browser window, maybe from a news article or something like that. If I get stuck after the second or third try, I&#x27;ll pick another random word, even if it contains a few discarded letters in order to ferret out 1 or 2 more valid letters.<p>For me, the best part of Wordle is not in finding the answer but in the steps prior as I work out the path to solving the correct answer.

Using the &quot;same words every time&quot; (i.e., a fixed set of initial guesses) has been studied before [1,2,3]. It is one of the few remaining open questions about Wordle. Interestingly, it can be done in 6+1 guesses [4] (COMBO FATTY GRRRL SPUDS VENGE WHILK, then the possibilities are always narrowed down to a singleton). However, it is unknown whether it is possible within 5+1 guesses, which would make Wordle 100% solvable even with such a constrained approach!<p>It is unfortunate that 3Blue1Brown&#x27;s excellent video has been so often misquoted as providing &quot;optimal&quot; guesses for Wordle. Of course, one can legitimately argue that using maths takes the fun out of the game... but if we *are* going to use maths, then the information entropy approach is simply not the one most suited to this specific game (because the dictionary is fully known).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30094398" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30094398</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.poirrier.ca&#x2F;notes&#x2F;wordle-optimal&#x2F;#fixed-guesses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.poirrier.ca&#x2F;notes&#x2F;wordle-optimal&#x2F;#fixed-guesses</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alexandres&#x2F;magicwordschallenge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alexandres&#x2F;magicwordschallenge</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alexandres&#x2F;magicwordschallenge&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alexandres&#x2F;magicwordschallenge&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2</a>

I&#x27;ll also take this opportunity to plug Semantle, which is an infuriating game that I can&#x27;t resist. It&#x27;s based on word2vec. You get infinite guesses, and you&#x27;re given feedback on how &quot;semantically similar&quot; each guess is. It often takes me 100+ guesses.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semantle.novalis.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semantle.novalis.org&#x2F;</a>

I used to start with ADIEU because it contains 4 vowels and the most common ones at that. But I&#x27;ve since moved on from that because I found I would be forced to reuse vowels in words 3 or 4.<p>I&#x27;m vaguely tempted to take the dictionary and figure out an optimal strategy that 1) guarantees success and 2) minimizes the number of guesses. If you assume every word is equally possible (it isn&#x27;t; they&#x27;re manually chosen) there would be an optimal starting word. I&#x27;m sure others have looked into this but this is something I&#x27;d like to do myself.<p>After that it branches depending on what hits you get on that first word. It may be possible that a second fixed word (or a small set of second words easily memorized) would be near-optimal but not actually optimal. I&#x27;d be curious to know this too.<p>But I&#x27;m curious how good an optimal strategy would be vs some of the naive strategies we&#x27;ve all chosen.<p>It&#x27;s also an interesting question as to when it&#x27;s worth switching from finding what letters are in the word vs locking down their position. If you get COAST and AT are in the word but in the wrong position, should your next attempt be 5 new letters or a word containing AT in different positions? The disadvantage of this of course is you&#x27;re only testing 3 new letters.<p>I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one&#x27;s harder and the strategy is a little different. There I&#x27;ve pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants.

Obviously anyone can play however they like and how they enjoy the game. But I feel like this &quot;enter three optimized words and win&quot; is too easy. So instead I go with hard mode, and have to think some more. I still start with the same word every time, but from there on most parts vary. I also allow myself to fall back to normal mode if finding the word depends on pure luck (e.g. _ATCH).<p>Bonus: If you and your friends play hard mode, you can try to do a reverse wordle on their solutions.

Since switching to hard mode, I almost never start with “good words”. Too much risk of getting the 10 possibilities with 3 guesses remaining type situation.

Huh. Am I alone in thinking that hard mode (must reuse previous letters) should be the only option? Being able to choose a completely different word to fill in the gaps seems overly easy... (There&#x27;s still luck, but it&#x27;s vastly easier).

Roate<p>Pulis<p>Chynd<p>This does more than half of the alphabet for the most frequently used letters.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slc.is&#x2F;posts&#x2F;bestwordlestrategy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slc.is&#x2F;posts&#x2F;bestwordlestrategy.html</a>

I always start with SNAIL ROUTE.<p>Those are the 10 most common letters in 5-letter words. Even if I get good hits with SNAIL, I enter ROUTE.

Opinions vary based on the input text, but the English letter frequency list I use starts ETAONRISH in descending frequency.<p>Based on that, coupled with a little bit of insight on English words (as opposed to random collections of 5 letters) I&#x27;ve ended up with ALIEN, STORM, CHUMP as my regular first 3. Sometimes I deviate if the earlier rows offer insight, and sometimes I swap the first 2 based on a whim.<p>And unless it is obviously worth a try, I use my first 3 words to <i>eliminate</i> letters and <i>not</i> to guess.<p>I usually get it in 4, sometimes in 5, almost never needing 6, and have failed once. So not necessarily the best, but good enough.

The PIOUS LEARN all the vowels in 2 words with other common letters, it isn&#x27;t specifically about eliminating entropy.<p>If an E exists but not in the second spot then it is THMYE to learn more.

Just use a random word, luck will do the rest.

I used to start with IRATE&#x2F;CLOUD to knock out all the vowels, but after wordle bot I usually start with CRANE now.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2022&#x2F;upshot&#x2F;wordle-bot.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2022&#x2F;upshot&#x2F;wordle-bot.h...</a>

I thought it was in that linked video or somewhere that I found a list of starting words to try to make it easier to solve it based on letter frequency and getting a few vowels in within the scope of the Wordle word list (not a dictionary list).<p>These are the words I use:<p>SOARE<p>TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram)<p>ADIEU<p>By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avoid letters found to be incorrect). That helps most of the time.<p>One of the annoying (or challenging) things about Wordle is that its word list has many sets of words that differ by just one letter. For example, you may get _ATCH right and then have to really guess if it’s going to be CATCH or BATCH or PATCH or MATCH or WATCH or LATCH or HATCH (maybe there are more words with a different first letter in this range). I’ve seen several sets of words like this. Just can’t do this within six total guesses. So chance does matter.

I&#x27;ve settled on the following word list to determine if 20 of 26 characters are present within 4 guesses:<p><pre><code> thank fuels crowd gimpy </code></pre> If there are fewer than 5 letters present, &quot;bevvy&quot; will eliminate another two (&#x27;b&#x27; and &#x27;v&#x27;), leaving j, q, x, and z as the remaining possible characters. These occur rarely (though &quot;pizza&quot;, &quot;bijou&quot;, and &quot;vixen&quot; can be challenging targets. More usually, it&#x27;s words with either doubled characters, such as &quot;onion&quot; or &quot;lalai&quot;, or those which have viable anagrams (&quot;spams&quot; and &quot;spasm&quot;, &quot;donor&quot; and &quot;rondo&quot;) that will throw me.

I usually employ two entry words that employ the vowels, sometimes the second word isn’t necessary, but often I’ll just throw it in - it kinda makes the first two lines of play redundant as a game, but I can’t really think of a better way to solve!

I always start, very ego-centrically, with my last name (matching my HN account name), and then usually follow up with BEADS and JUICY to cover all the vowels. But I&#x27;ll try guess the target word if the first or first two words give me &gt;= 3 hits. Then I&#x27;ll spend WAY more time trying to solve the 5 daily chess puzzles at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chess.com&#x2F;puzzles&#x2F;rated" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chess.com&#x2F;puzzles&#x2F;rated</a> ...

I actually made a Wordle variant me and my family have been playing that prevents you using a word you have ever used before (unless it is that day&#x27;s word). It&#x27;s a really small tweak and it takes a while to have any impact, but it makes the game so much more interesting for me. (jezzamon.com&#x2F;wordle if anyone wants to try it)<p>No idea if it&#x27;ll become unplayable eventually but I&#x27;m having fun seeing it play out as more and more common words get locked out

I start with two words that use all the vowels plus Y, and the most common consonants TNLR etc. e.g. AUDIO ENTRY then to save having to mentally step through all the possibilities (the least fun part of wordle) I use a word finder that takes the letters in the word, the letters not in the word, and any green letters in the right place to produce a list of the remaining possibilities.

Originally I used BLACK, WHITE, SOUND, and tried to guess from there, occasionally throwing in GRUMP if the word wasn&#x27;t obvious. I didn&#x27;t like the repeated vowel, and knowing if there was a Y in the word would help, so I switched to:<p>AMUCK FETID SWORN GLYPH<p>100% so far. One or two of those may have involved aggressively grepping &#x2F;usr&#x2F;share&#x2F;dict&#x2F;words, though.

Having a set of words is important when trying to complete as fast as possible. This pretty much sets up the game into 2 phases, one where you just brute force typing from memory and another where you solve the puzzle at once. If it&#x27;s too hard sometimes it&#x27;s better to just reset and start a new puzzle.

Interesting!<p>I have a similar strategy, I always start with<p>Blame Horny Cupid<p>The sequence has the upside of containing every vowel, without repeating a single character. Downside is it does not contain some pretty common consonants, I&#x27;m gonna have to try some of the sequences suggested in the post to compare what seems better now

There are 28 letters. With 3 initial same words you can cover up to 53.5% of the alphabet. With 4 initial same words you can cover up to 71.4%. There are only 5 vowels A, E, I, O and U which can be covered with the first two words. You can even add Y in the first two words played.

I start with REAIS and YOUTH.<p>But I don&#x27;t think it is a good idea for the average person to have too many set words. Unless you have great knowledge of the dictionary of legal words you might need extra clues to word order etc. ie I recently got a game with a letter repeated 3 times.

REACT<p>PIOUS<p>Hits all the vowels except Y. But I feel like it&#x27;s not so great. Wish I could replace the P with something more useful.

For octordle I like CORNY and ADIEU for my first two guesses. Gets all the vowels and enough to start. For wordle, starting from STERN or a few other words like that is fine.<p>Josh Wardle is a cultural icon. He&#x27;s really done an amazing thing.

An average of about 3.8 is not hard to achieve. Much harder is to reduce the number of failures, (i.e., requiring more than 6 guesses). At least in hard mode, that&#x27;s true. I&#x27;m experimenting with easy mode now.

If you are lucky or clairvoyant, you can make a sort-of-haiku out of the guesses. Some of my actual games:<p>Troll stopped play: IRATE TROLL SPORT SHORT<p>Alas poor Yorick: STARE SPOIL SKULL<p>New virtual law firm: IRATE CLOUD LEGAL<p>Reacting to The Slap: IRATE SHOUT PUNCH SNOUT

I use SHITE, ACORN, then do targeted guessed from there.

My strategy is to use whatever word with three vowels that pops into my head. Seems to work pretty well and keeps it fun.

My goto 1st 3 words are: SNORT, ADIEU, GLYPH

nice writeup! been doing something similar for same reason, lines 83-96 cut to chase in this gist, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;DotDotJames&#x2F;ce331904848fc6cfecc80c522adde106" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;DotDotJames&#x2F;ce331904848fc6cfecc80c52...</a>

I’ve been starting with LATER and SONIC, then adding DUMPY if I still don’t have a clue.

I always start with ADIEU and THORN. CLASP sometimes next. But I solve in 3 most often.

I start every Wordle with the word PENIS in order to assert dominance over the puzzle.

Once you figure this out and figure out what words those should be, it ruins the game.

Wait, you don&#x27;t play on hard mode? I can&#x27;t respect that at all

my friends and i, on a group chat, always start today&#x27;s wordle with the answer from yesterday.<p>that way, we can actually measure how we&#x27;re doing against each other so it&#x27;s a more fun competition.

ADIEU<p>PORTS (or FORTY if ADIEU doesn&#x27;t match anything)<p>I just want all the vowels.

I have had success using nymph as my start word.

CHANT<p>LIMED<p>YOURS<p>and I almost always get it on the fourth guess, sometimes in three guesses

Aurei and Ghost get you most of the way

ALIEN<p>ROUST<p>gets all the vowels plus some very common consonants

Feast bring chump dowly

COUNT + RAISE for me

My list<p>STARE BLIND CHUMP

Crane<p>Might<p>Plows<p>—-<p>95% success rate.