BAN #395: How to play Wordle better

[Hubble image of NGC 3603. Credit: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (UVa), F. Paresce (NIA, Bologna, Italy), E. Young (USRA/Ames Research Center), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)]

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Monday 17 January, 2022:  Does Saturn's Death Star moon have an ocean under its surface?

Tuesday 18 January, 2022: Stellar intruder makes a grazing hit-and-run on a pair of young stars

Wednesday 19 January, 2022: Martian mystery: Why is an isotope of carbon depleted on the surface of Mars?

Thursday 20 January, 2022: Weird chemistry is making the Earth's interior cool faster than thought

Friday 21 January, 2022: Rare beast: An eccentric Neptunish exoplanet orbits a nearby red dwarf star

Something fun

Remember fun?

Wanna know how to play Wordle better? I have a not-very-secret secret that makes it a lot easier but still fun. Read on!

If you’ve been on any social media lately you’ve heard about Wordle. It’s a browser-based word game that’s extremely popular — partly because it’s simple, cleanly executed, and fun. You can only play once a day, making it harder to get tired of it… but it’s also popular because the creator, Josh Wardle (yes, the name is a pun) did something very clever: He made it easy to share your results for a game without spoiling it. 

[Wordle score share as it’s presented in Twitter.]

The ability to brag should not be underrated. The story behind the game is fun, too.

The idea is simple: You have to guess a five-letter word. You enter the letters, and if you have one that’s both correct and in the correct place you get a green square, if it’s in the word but in the wrong place you get a yellow square, and if it’s not in the word you get a gray square. You also get a little keyboard display that tells you what letters you’ve guessed, color-coded as above. It’s very similar to the old board game Mastermind.

I see a lot of people on Twitter complaining that they aren’t very good at it, which is understandable. If you’re just guessing somewhat randomly it can be pretty hard. But you don’t have to guess randomly…

I’m pretty good at word games, and in general I get the word in 3-4 guesses. Usually three, unless it’s either a word that has unusual letters, or where I get 4 slots filled and the last letter could be any one of several choices. I’ve gotten it on my second guess a couple of times, mostly because my guesses aren’t random.

The best thing to know to play the game well is what letters are the most common in the English language. I remember reading a story by scifi master Fredric Brown (he wrote the short story “Arena” on which a hundred TV shows based an episode) called “ETAOIN SHRDLU”, about a kind of printing press that becomes sentient (it was written in the 1940s). Those letters, in order, are the most commonly used in printing, and it was handy to know that back in the days when printing was set by hand.

On the other hand, this is a word game based on just any old five-letter word, not just ones most used in typesetting. If you broaden the idea to all words in the English language, the most common letters, in order, are:

EAR IOT NSL CUD

You probably see where I’m going. Instead of entering any old word, you can maximize the leverage of your first word by using the most common letters. I tend to use TARES or RATES. Some people like to have more vowels in their first guess, like AUDIO, ADIOS, ADIEU, ORATE, or IRATE, but you can play with it and see what works best for you.

Here’s an example of the game I played on Saturday:

[Wordle for January 22, 2022]

I guessed RATES, and the E is in the word but in the wrong place. OK. There’s no A, so the word probably has an O, U, I, or another E in it. I wanted to know the vowels, so I typed in WOULD.

I got lucky: The W was in the right place. Statistically speaking a lot of words that start with W have an H after it, and I needed the E in a different place, so I tried WHINE.

I got lucky again. No H, but still two right in the right place, two right in the wrong place. I figure it had to be WIN (something) E, which I immediately realized sucked: Two letters left could go in the black. I guessed G and it was wrong. C got me WINCE, and I was done.

If I had guessed COULD instead of WOULD I might’ve saved a turn, but oh well. Note too that sometimes double letters are in the word, and that can be really hard to figure out. Not my best outing; the method doesn’t always work but, on average and over the long run, it should be an advantage.

Anyway, the trick here is to a) know the most common letters, and 2) know letter combinations. An H usually follows a W or an S. H or K follow C, and so on. And, of course, there’s just the logic of seeing a letter out of place and figuring out where it’s likely to go given what you already have up.

I find games can be frustrating when I don’t have a basic grasp if what’s needed to play. If that’s true for you with Wordle, I hope this helps. I love word games like this! I find they keep me sharp and help me think, and they use a part of my brain that’s somewhat different than writing so it feels like a break even though I’m still staring at a screen trying to come up with words. Which, in a nutshell, is my day job.

So enjoy! And may your average Wordle score drop by a point.

P.S. I noticed when looking at the letter grid in Wordle that I see little gray blobs in the corners between squares, what’s called the Hermann Grid Illusion. Do you see them too? I dub this Wordlusion.

Et alia

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