Facebook Twitter

Is there more strategy to Wordle than you think? What’s the best word to start with?

Struggling with Wordle? Here are some tips to help you improve your guessing game

SHARE Is there more strategy to Wordle than you think? What’s the best word to start with?
Photo of the Wordle game website.

Wordle has become the internet’s new favorite game. Here are some strategies to guess the word quickly

Screenshot, powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle

If you have been playing Wordle, then you’ve probably tried different strategies to crack the code.

Wordle, the free, wildly popular online game, requires players to guess a five-letter word in six tries, once a day. It’s safe to say that a lot rides on the first guess. Here are some strategies to elevate your play.

A numbers game

YouTuber Grant Sanderson created an algorithm that is capable of playing Wordle and determined that there are 13,000 possible answers, per Polygon. Using words like “slice,” “tried” and “crane” can reduce the number of possible words substantially.

It’s all about vowels

Almost every word has a vowel, so if your first word is filled with three or more, it can make the guessing game easier, according to Woman’s Day.

Words like “adieu,” “about,” “aisle” and “ocean” are some great examples.

Other commonly used letters

Google’s director of research Peter Norvig analyzed data from Google Books to create a list of most commonly used letters in English. Here are the top 10:

  1. E.
  2. T.
  3. A.
  4. O.
  5. I.
  6. N.
  7. S.
  8. R.
  9. H.
  10. L.

The best words out of these top 10 letters are “later,” “alter,” “alert,” “arose,” “irate,” “resin” and “notes.”

Things to remember

Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, created this came for his partner who loved word games. The game doesn’t send you notifications to come back to it. Per The New York Times, Wordle doesn’t want an intense relationship.

  • “It’s something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day,” he said. “And that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”