How I Wordle

By now the entire internet knows about the craze that’s sweeping the nation, Wordle.  I began my own Wordle obsession after hearing about it on Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me a few weeks ago.  It’s an addictive game for sure.  It was a brilliant move on the part of the creator to provide only one word daily.  It keeps us all wanting more. 

Everyone has a strategy for playing.  There are articles on how to beat Wordle all over the internet.  Some of them seem a bit too complicated for my taste.  It takes the fun out of the game.  I believe in being strategic, but I am not going to start creating my own algorithms. 

I do have my own strategy though.  I think it’s interesting to see how people play and what everyone does to come up with the right word.  I thought it would be fun to share my strategy and see how it compares.

My strategy works too.  I have never not guessed the word. (I may be jinxing myself by saying that.)

For my first try I start with a word that contains at least two “Wheel of Fortune” letters (L,N,S,T,R,E) and two vowels (including the aforementioned E).  A good example of this would be SNARE.

Once my results for my first word come back, my next step is to see what vowels I have left.  I like to build words around the available vowels.  For my example, if the word contains neither A nor e, I consider words that use O and U or O and I in combination with each other.

If I have any correct consonants in my first guess, I look for how they might be used in various consonant combinations such as SH, TH, ND, CR, NG, ST, RM, or RN that would likely come at the beginning or end of a word and how they would work with my available vowels.

Let’s assume I didn’t cleverly guess the word on the second try (it happened once).  What are my next steps?  At this point I probably eliminated a few more consonants and possibly more vowels.  This will have shrunk my pool of letters nicely.  Now it’s time to consider the less popular letters (the letters that score high in Scrabble).  If U is one of the vowels, would a Q work anywhere?  I look at possibilities for K (this can be pretty common at the end of words), J, Z, X and Y.  I also have to remember words with silent letters like a silent W or K (I struggled to the end when the word of the day was knoll).

After three tries, if I don’t have a good idea what the word is, I start plugging in the guesses with the remaining pool of letters.  It’s not automatically easy if you have a few correct letters in place.  I almost ran out of guesses the day the word was light, because I tried might and fight first.  I also have to consider double letters (back to knoll again). 

In my general experience, the harder it is to come up with a word by my third try, the more likely it will be the third try is correct.

I believe it’s a good strategy.  It’s not complicated.  So far it has given me a weeks-long streak.  Do my friends have a strategy, or is it more fun to make random guesses.  Let’s talk.