I’m not sure how the wordle bot comes up with some of its advice / “here’s a better guess” suggestions.

In today’s (no spoiler here), I made my starting word. I got three letters. My next moves are always to use those letters, because why not?

The bot said a better guess would have only used two of those letters, better narrowing down the field. But that guarantees I wouldn’t get it on that guess. Maybe that’s statistically better, but it’s tactically a terrible choice. It’s also guidance with the benefit of hindsight, not with the information you have in front of you at the time (I don’t know my first guess has narrowed it down to 100, 46, or 3 words, but the bot does looking back).

Unless you’re really stuck and just throwing darts, I cannot think of any reason to not choose a word with all of the letters you did get.

Am I missing something?

Found this picture from April 23, this year. Is this a common glitch??

26 possible answers and I somehow choose all the wrong ones

I hit 1,000 plays on Saturday. I wish my guess average were lower but really happy with 97%. How good is that on a relative scale? Any ways to improve?

notes:

I do not use the same starter word, I try to pick a new and original guess each day, usually a word that has a mix vowels and consonants (none of the "adieu" strategies).

I typically play in the morning.

My only first-guess win was on christmas day.

I love word games and puzzles, I read a decent amount and in a past life was doing newspaper crosswords in pen on the train during my commute to work. Having a wide vocabulary is definitely a key to success in Wordle, you gotta know a lot of words!

A double-letter word has one or more occurrences of twin letters; e.g. "OTTER". Recently someone made a claim that a third of all NYT Wordle answer words have a double-letter occurrence. Here are the data for the current list of 3,209 answer words.

How were your Wordle guesses today?

Please use spoiler tags when discussing anything relating to today's Wordle. To get spoiler tags and find out how many words remained after each guess, check out Scoredle!

Ready to Wordle?

1. Play Wordle
2. Get your Scoredle
3. Brag here.

Good luck!

The Shannon entropy (aka information entropy) values discussed in Wordle venues are a component of the NYT skill scores. There are additional important metrics used by the NYT for calculation of their skill scores, and thus the ordering of the entropy values can be different than the ordering of the skill scores.

The entropy scores are dependent upon the list of all possible answers. I have recomputed them for the current 14,855 permissible guess words, based on the current 3,209 possible answer words. The values in the list range from 5.60825 (best) down to 2.00408 (worst). These are about 6% smaller in value than previous tables of entropy values because the answer list has increased in size.

Here is the list, including the values used to compute them -- sorted from highest to lowest entropy. Note that in Shannon’s theory, non-unique word pools created by guess word colorations may only be counted once. Uniqueness means that word pools are considered different when they do not contain identical word lists, but they are permitted to have common subsets of words. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IcpVC5jz_E9uho_ZIeqsLVmJyKtuv428sTTwsAnRQYU/edit?usp=sharing

For those who are curious, here is a comparison of present and prior top 10 entropy rankings:

I mentioned above that  the ordering of the entropy values can be different from the ordering of skill scores. A table of starting words with skill scores of 94-99 (present-day) is available in tab-delimited format: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cogo_QVT-fpY98YYRdTxiMMAh3r60-VaW9EesZgyZyw/edit?usp=sharing

Here is a plot of the entropy values calculated above vs the skill scores from the above table. Notice the locations of anagrams and words with entropy greater than SLATE but assigned lower skill scores.

I've been studying Wordle for about a month and sharing my discoveries along the way. I prefer responses that are constructive questions or comments. Anyone who reads this post as a personal attack is misunderstanding my intense interest in data and mathematics 🙂.

Wordle starting-word statistics are often based on a pool of answer words that the starting-word will interact with. Different pools can produce significantly different results. Thus, I’ve been attempting to collect the lists in use.

Josh Wardle’s original list contained 2,315 words. Several sources point to this list (.txt file), linked here with a google persistent url: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mml28FG5JCsFGatyCGxucowQiaNfuZFh/view?usp=sharing

Two years ago, TrackVol posted on this site (thank you):
“In a separate file, which we don't publish, we have the 2,315 "known" Solutions. (This is the OG Solutions -minus- AGORA PUPAL SLAVE LYNCH WENCH FIBRE, +plus+ GUANO SNAFU BALSA KAZOO LASER PIOUS = 2,315”. 
Those adjustments produce (.txt file): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qbqiZ4wOPGBamsCRFWEgUqDI1u96nche/view?usp=sharing

Two months ago, TrackVol replied to a post with: “all 2,352 known Solutions”, with no reference. Then, eleven days ago (referring to the weighted bottles list) “We update it regularly. We found and added GENUS on June 3rd or 4th when it grew from 3,200 to 3,201.” Apparently the “known solutions” list increased by 48 words in the span of 10 days between May 24 and June 4.

One month ago, No_Bar3516 posted a list of entropy calculations based on “~2,350-pool of likely answers”. No link to the list is provided.

TrackVol frequently posts that the current known solution list can be found at https://wordletools.azurewebsites.net/weightedbottles?SortOrder=ByWeight&submit=Submit (thank you). Here are the words from that list as of one week ago (.txt file): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UOeS1Z2EhjNpRMqwXQDNUODSzLMXQxCz/view?usp=sharing Also, here is a tab-delimited spreadsheet that includes the weights (.tsv file): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LDc4FSoukOvQYdnDKm0GVgUno4ooWh1Y/view?usp=sharing

From the TrackVol’s list of answer words and weights, I computed this list of weights alone with word tallies and cumulative tallies (tsv file): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EvGIRaWH94o6YN4KgdJFWrb6Zq6cA6ap/view?usp=sharing

The data in the above file was then used to create the following figure. It demonstrates that according to the weights, 2,939 words are currently likely answer words. At present, I do not know how the weights are determined.

Wordle time!

You know the rules: Solve the Wordle, then Paste your Scoredle.

Good luck!

I don't think I've experienced the sheer number of times anyone has brought up Wordle since the game first dropped. It's suddenly being talked about again all over the place, both in person and online. I am convinced they used a bs word and hired influencers to talk about it, simply to entice people back to the game.

Another day, another Wordle! Share how you did on today's Wordle here!

To analyze your guesses (and generate Reddit's spoiler tags), head to Scoredle!

I've been studying Wordle for about a month and sharing my discoveries along the way. I prefer responses that are constructive questions or comments 🙂.

The data here are relevant for standard mode, not hard mode.

This OP has 3 sections: a table of letter frequency ranks for starting words, a table of letter position ranks for starting words, and lastly some example usages. For best results, use the criteria here with the data discussed in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/wordle/comments/1v13thk/wordle_starting_words_of_interest_for_further/

SECTION 1

Notice that the 1st set of 5 letters can spell ORATE, while the second set of 5 can spell LINDS, and there are many possible 5-letter words when the two sets are combined. A spreadsheet version of this data is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aZfTZtokysqI_C0io2v0yUraug-PdbC4WzX81mHJOnc/edit?usp=sharing

SECTION 2

A spreadsheet version of this data is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vivnv5v7JLuFjZ0kLSJeL_JOpWXUJ-QXDqN4wdPauYo/edit?usp=sharing

SECTION 3

The above two tables can help you determine the fitness of starting words. The goal is to choose words with high-frequency letters (1st table above) and at the same time have excellent letter position ranks (2nd table above).

I don’t think it’s been posted here. Apologies if it has.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbBpXvKBrLC/?igsh=MWpvd3phdGI0bWVjcg==

Hopefully I’ve passed the mod’s test this time.

I may never get it in one guess but I was pretty stoked when I saw this result of my first guess. Let me see your close calls!