Wordle, daily are from Guessing game, are using Twitter, world, and my relationship was turbulent.
If you haven’t heard of it — how? — The rules are very simple. Every day there is a new five letter word (Wordle.) You will have six attempts to guess it, and after each attempt, the color of the cells will change to let you know if a letter is in the word and in the correct position. in place or not (green), in the word but not in the right place (yellow), or not in the word (gray.)
These limitations are what makes Wordle so interesting. Everyone in the world (and especially in my house) is trying to guess the same word with the least number of guesses. The clever thing is that you can share your progress after it succeeds — but all the letters are disguised as colored blocks. So you can gloat without giving anything away.
But never say there’s a game that can’t be beaten (or, according to my girlfriend, destroyed) with a little research, analysis, and time. So, if you’ve ever wondered what the best strategy to win at Wordle is, let’s break it down.
Distributing mail in English
Letter frequency analysis is the study of how often and where letters appear in words. It’s pretty basic to cryptography, because if you have to decode a secret message like we’re doing with Wordle, it’s helpful to know that you’re more likely to see an E than a Q.
While the exact letter frequency distribution varies based on the source text, the most common letters don’t actually change.
Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, used data from Google Books to come up with this list of the 12 most common letters in English:
- E (in 12.49 percent of words)
- T (9.28 percent)
- A (8.04 percent)
- O (7.64 percent)
- I (7.57 percent)
- N (7.23 percent)
- S (6.51 percent)
- R (6.28 percent)
- H (5.05 percent)
- L (4.07 percent)
- D (3.82 percent)
- C (3.34 percent)
However, there is a problem with this list for our Lyricist. It is based on a natural language source text, which means word the kind of messed things up for us. The is by far the most common word in the English language, accounting for 7.14% of all words in the Google Books source text, followed by belong to (4.16 percent), and (3.04 percent), and arrive (2.6 percent). This means that the positions of T and H in the list are higher than normal.
Another option is to simply look at the distribution of letters in the dictionaries. An analysis of Concise Oxford Dictionary (September 9, 1995) found the 12 most common letters to be:
