Wordle, the daily word guessing game, is taking Twitter, the world, and my relationship by storm.
If you haven’t heard of it—how?—the rules are simple. Every day there’s a new five-letter word (a Wordle.) You get six attempts to guess it, and after each one the color of the tiles change to tell you whether a letter was in the word and in the right place (green), in the word but not in the right place (yellow), or not in the word (gray.)
These limitations are what make Wordle so fun. Everyone in the world (and, in particular, in my house) is attempting to guess the same word in the fewest number of guesses. What’s clever is you can share your progress after you succeed—but all the letters are disguised as colored blocks. So you can gloat without giving anything away.
But never let it be said there’s a game that can’t be beaten (or, according to my girlfriend, ruined) with a bit of research, analysis, and time. So, if you’ve ever wondered what the best strategy is for winning at Wordle, let’s break it down.
Letter Distribution in the English LanguageLetter frequency analysis is the study of how often and where letters occur in words. It’s pretty foundational to cryptography, because if you have to decode a secret message like we’re kind of doing with Wordle, it’s useful to know that you are more likely to see an E than a Q.
While exact letter frequency distribution changes based on the source text, the most common letters don’t really change.
Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, used the data from Google Books to come up with this list of the top 12 most common letters in the English language:
Indeed, The is a smart choice as the first letter in Wordle to increase your chance of success because it's an essential part or prefix for numerous words you can formulate.
Starting with 'the' in Wordle gamers is a clever trick, as it immediately yields the potential for learning more about one of our most beloved beginnings: love. Well-crafted and sure to stir up some interesting initial guesses!
