Unless you’re living under a rock, you must’ve heard about Wordle. You know, the game that millions of people are playing every day. Not only playing but engaging in Wordle conversations on social media like it’s an inseparable part of their routine. Yes, Wordle has that kinda pull.
They want to get better at it. You do too. After all, there’s no point in spending time on something daily unless you get rewarded in some way. And Wordle rewards you with the ability to share your glorious results online, in the form of green, yellow, and grey tiles that indicate the unique path you took to arrive at the word.
Curious how you can get better at this word-guessing phenomenon? Want to do better than your friends at Wordle? This guide is just for you.
Related: How to play Wordle
How to play Wordle smartly
We’ll start with the basics. Do not waste any tries. You get 6 of them and they’re all equally important. Remember if you fail to guess the secret word in 6 tries, you fail. Your streak is broken and you’ll have nothing to show for the day (we’re exaggerating of course). But really, we mean it when we say every try pushes you one step closer to both correctly and incorrectly guessing the word.
Hop on early. Yes, try to play the day’s word as early as you can. This is constructive both ways, you either guess the word and enjoy a great start to your day or you have a whole day to get it right.
Try to avoid swaying your guesses towards the previous day’s word. It’s highly unlikely that you would get a similar word twice in a span matter of days. After all, according to its source code Wordle has 2315 possible solutions and as of now, the counter is at 221 (which is less than 10%) unique words.
Related: Wordle Game Rules Explained
How to find Wordle hints in Wordle
If you’re not already using Wordle’s hints to improve your future guesses, it’s high time you start doing it. Wordle provides 3 different color-coded tiles (green, yellow, and grey) as a way to help you identify the secret word.
Green gives you the exact position of a letter in the word, yellow tells you the presence of a letter in that word without confirming its location while grey confirms a letter’s absence from the word.
For example, let’s analyze the thought process of nailing this (look at the picture below) Wordle in just 2 tries. Our first guess is ADIEU. A widely popular first guess, ADIEU has 4 vowels (A, I, E, U) and 1 consonant (D). And would you look at that, we’ve got 2 green tiles and 1 yellow tile right from the onset. This is a great first guess and starting point for our guessing journey.
It’s hidden but we actually have quite a lot of information to make an intelligent 2nd guess. We know the answer has I and E as its 3rd and 4th letter respectively. We also know that U belongs somewhere (either 1st or 2nd place) in the answer and that A and D don’t occur in it.
Let’s say U occurs in the 1st place. Wait! Don’t enter a guess yet. It’s better to process various possible combinations in your mind or somewhere in writing. Let’s try to recount 5 letter words that have I and E as their 3rd and 4th letter respectively. Remember that Wordle has common words, so try to avoid obscure 5 letter words in your initial guesses.
chief, tried, brief, quiet, tries, dried, cried, alien, grief, flies, skies, cries, fried, thief, spies, drier, crier, skied, plies, frier, ariel.
Let’s further remove words that include A or D.
chief, brief, quiet, tries, grief, flies, skies, cries, thief, spies, crier, plies, frier.
Let’s now remove words that either don’t have U or have it at the 5th place.
quiet.
That’s it. That sounds like the answer. Let’s check if QUIET is the answer.
Voila! The secret word was in fact QUIET.
What first guess is mathematically the most optimal
Wordle has an awesome community. Some of these players also happen to be coders. Tyler Glaiel is one of Wordle’s fans who went above and beyond to make a code that computes the optimal starting word for Wordle. You can check out the code here. Tyler’s bot uses the brute force method to determine the average number of tries his code takes to guess all words in Wordle’s Dictionary when starting with a particular word.
There are various metrics we can use to measure the goodness of a guess. Tyler’s bot uses “how many possible solutions are left on average after making this guess” as its metric of choice.
It turns out ROATE is the optimal starting guess for Wordle. However, another word RAISE gives you a chance to hit on the first try while being only slightly worse than ROATE on the average guess metric, clocking at 3.49546 guesses.
This means if we start with RAISE and run Tyler’s bot for all possible Wordle solutions (2315), the average number of guesses comes out to be 3.49546.
What are some Wordle tips I should know about
As an experienced Wordle player, you must-have tips and tricks at your disposal every time you step into a new word and a new challenge when the clock strikes 00:00. If you’re new to the game, understand that it’s a journey and you will only get better with time.
However, it’s always nice if you have someone holding your hand. Read ahead to learn how you can make your daily word guessing experience more efficient.
Related: 8 Best ‘Wordle Helper’ Websites and Tips
1. Your first guess is very important
As we already discussed in this guide, starting out strong is crucial. Your first guess can be any 5 letter word. That’s what makes it strange and fascinating, you start out with a blank slate and no information on the hidden word. It’s totally up to you to use the information you get from your guesses and decode the word.
Do not use words with repeated letters as your starting guess since you’re ruling out places that could give you distinct information. Words like GUESS, MELEE, AMASS can be words of the day themselves but it’s not worth it to start with them.
Related: Wordle: 5-Letter Words With the Most Vowels (Three and Four Vowels Words)
With that in mind, here are some words you can start with: ADIEU, MASTER, STORY, ABOUT, EQUAL, NOTES, RESIN, SENOR.
Some players also believe that it’s best to use starting words with 5 different letters in them. Statistically, the letters S, E, A, O, R, I, L, T, N, and U are the most common letters in 5 letter words. So, it makes sense to pick starting words that include these letters, like ROATE, RAISE, and ULTRA.
2. Beware of repeated letters
As we already mentioned, it’s not advisable to use words with repeated letters as your starting guess. Entering words like GUESS, MELEE, AMASS can leave you desiring for more information.
Words can have two or more occurrences of the same letter, which can then lead to tricky situations. For example, let’s say the word of the day is BLESS and you know (from your previous tries) that there’s one S in the answer. So if your next guess is something like ASHES, Wordle will return a green tile in the 5th place and a yellow one in the 2nd place. Thus, confirming the place of the 1st S while also informing you of the presence of a 2nd S.
3. Don’t ignore any clue
6 tries. That’s all you get every day when you begin solving that day’s Wordle. These tries are precious and you should try not to lose them for nothing. Even more precious are the hints that Wordle relays after every entered guess. Ignoring hints is as good as wasting away a try since the primary purpose of a try is to give you more information about the secret word.
Every tile is important in narrowing down the possibilities. The green and yellow tiles are vital of course but the grey tiles are equally significant. They tell you straight up that a letter is not present in the answer. Believe it or not, there are situations where looking closely at the grey tiles will help you arrive at the answer in the blink of an eye.
4. You can google without cheating
If all else fails there’s a way googling can help you solve Wordle without explicitly cheating. Look at the picture below. Let’s say you’re stuck at this point and you can’t recall words that start with S and end with R, much less words that include an A at either the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th place. Here’s what you do, you hop on https://www.google.co.in/ and you search “5 letter words that start S and end with R”.
Use your googling skills and open a relevant search result. For example, we open the first search result.
You can repeat this process until you arrive at the secret word by elimination. It’s a little bit of a grey area but if you’re not confident in your vocabulary, this is the way to go.
5. Use Wordle Helper websites
Yes, there are some really good websites that help you find the correct word in Wordle. Check out the link below to find 4 cool websites to use your green and yellow colored letters to find the answer pretty quickly.
Related: 4 Best ‘Wordle Helper’ Websites
FAQs
What is the average number of guesses on Wordle?
According to the @WordleStats Twitter account, the average number of guesses it took people (who share their results on Twitter) to figure out Wordle #220 (which was a relatively easy one) is 3.93. You’ll find that if you calculate the same for other Wordles, the number will come out to be close to 4. However, for harder Wordles like Wordle #219, this number is close to 4.43.
However, we know that quite a lot of people exaggerate their results on Twitter. Based on these two observations it’s reasonable to assume that the average number of guesses on Wordle is close to 4 for easy to medium-hard words and around 5-6 for hard Words.
You can also read our guide on the same to get a detailed analysis on the average number of guesses in Wordle.
Related: What are the Average Number of Guesses in Wordle?
Is guessing in 5 tries considered bad?
No, not at all. It depends on your experience of playing Wordle and the difficulty level of the word. It’s entirely possible that someone might guess a hard word in 2-3 tries and someone else fails to guess an easy word at all.
Everything is relative. But if you want a definitive answer, if it took you 5 tries to guess a 5 letter word, there’s no doubt in our mind that you can do better.
Has Wordle repeated words as of now?
Every day as you wake up, Wordle’s website is working behind the scenes to pluck a 5-letter word from a randomly ordered list of 2,315 words.
If you’re wondering whether Wordle has repeated words as of 26th January 2022, we’re glad to tell you, no. So far, the world has played 221 distinct words. A new word every day.
How does wordle track my stats?
Cookies. Wordle uses your browser’s cookies to remember your stats like Games Played, Win%, Current Streak, and Max Streak.
When will Wordle end?
It’s January 26th, 2022 and we’ve just solved the 221st Wordle. We know from Wordle’s source code that it has 2315 possible solutions. Assuming Wordle will continue to offer distinct words until it runs out of them, we have 2094 words left in the tank. With one word a day that makes it 2094 more days (that’s around 5.73 years). A quick google search will tell you the day Wordle’s reign ends to be 21st October 2027.
If you have any more questions feel free to comment below.
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