Thursday

I just noticed that this post didn’t get published yesterday. Sorry. I have another post that will go online at 18:00 EDT

Does anybody play Wordle? If you do, I’m going to show you how to beat it almost every time. The secret to beating the game is not by guessing the letters. The best strategy is to eliminate letters. You eliminate as many letters as possible so at the end there are only a few possibilities. Now I used to use these five letter combinations: rates, filch, mound and gawky.  But after you enter these four words there would still be seven letters that you haven’t tried. Lately I’ve used these words: doers, filch, bumpy and twang. It took me an hour or so to come up with them. These words all together use twenty distinct letters, so there are only six letters that I haven’t tried. Not only that, those six letters are v, k, j, x, q and z, the least frequently used in our language. Usually you will get all five letters, barring duplicates, in your first four words. Here’s a chart that I put together showing the relative frequency of letters as they appear in the English language, and the frequency of the of the letters in my trial words. The bottom entries are the sums of the frequencies:

To enhance your chances of winning your first entry would be the word doers (highest frequency of appearance) followed by twang, filch and bumpy. Notice that the remaining six letters have the lowest probability of appearing in the solution.

Now, of course, if you have five correct letters before using all four words, you stop there and work out the solution. But if you use all four trial words you still have two more trial words left use.  Suppose you have two trial words left and there are three possible solutions. What you have to do is find words that use two of the possible letters. If one of them is correct, good. If neither is correct then the remaining solution is the one you want. Occasionally you might find a situation where there are, say, three possible solutions involving two letters. That’s happened to me, but I can’t recall the specific circumstances. You just have to be clever in the trial words that you choose.

In the worse case, and maybe, the only case wherein you might lose, is if you are left with four possible solutions with only two trial words left.