If you’re reading this, then you probably play Wordle or are at least curious about it. There are many appealing features of the game, including the social aspect and the fact that it’s limited to one play a day. If you particularly enjoy these features, then my advice on how to get better at the game may not be desirable. But if you just want to get better at solving the puzzles more of the time, read on.
The first way to get better is to play more often. Of the many Wordle clones and variants available, I’ve found https://octokatherine.github.io/word-master/ to be the best for just practicing. It has the exact same rules as Wordle, but the tiles turn faster and you can play as many times as you want. Just using this site will make you better at Wordle, which you can continue to play for its social aspects. All of the examples in this post are from the WordMaster site.
Using this site, I’ve played many games and come up with some strategies that seem to help me solve the puzzle within six guesses at least 99 times out of 100. Below are the main strategies I’ve discovered.
Opening Guesses
I always start off with the same two words, AILED and ROUTS. This covers all of the vowels (except Y) and some popular consonants. Using standard opening guesses like this may make the beginning of the game less interesting or exciting, but it produces more consistent results. Obviously there are many other words you could choose as your opening guesses, if you prefer to find out different information or just prefer different words.
The main downside of using two standard guesses to open is that your average number of guesses may go up. With this technique, it’s less likely you’ll get lucky and solve the puzzle in three guesses or fewer. I don’t personally care about this; I just want to solve the puzzle within six guesses virtually all the time. Once in a while I’ll skip the second standard guess if the first one turned up, say, four hits.
Making the Most of Your Guesses
If you share my goal of solving the puzzle successfully (as opposed to getting it in fewer guesses) then you can get a different perspective on why you make the guesses you make. Assuming you don’t play in hard mode (which seems impossible and not that much fun), you don’t need to use all of the information you already know in your subsequent guesses.
The main purpose of each guess should be to maximize the amount of new information you get from the guess. This often means choosing completely different letters from those that have already been revealed to be in the solution. Of course these known letters will come back into play in your final guesses, but intermediate guesses should be fact-finding missions for what you don’t yet know.
As an example, suppose this was the result from your opening guesses:
You might think “Oh, that A probably goes in the second position” and be tempted to guess something like “games”. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but probably not in this case. If you think about it, there are a tremendous number of other words that also fit the same pattern. For example: wanes, panes, manes, vanes, banes, bakes, makes, names, manes, wakes, cages, pages, wages, mages, sages, sakes, napes, vapes, paces, capes, caves, naves, paves, waves, mazes, etc. Obviously, you don’t have enough guesses to try all of these. If you get a thrill out of taking a big risk and trying to use your “intuition” in cases like these, then go ahead and take your best shot. But there is a better way to solve puzzles like these.
The way to solve more reliably in cases where there are too many possibilities is to make guesses that identify which of the letters are involved first. This will require ignoring what you already know, because guessing A in the 2nd place is probably a waste of time and guessing E and S at the end is definitely useless for giving you new information. Instead, pick a word that covers as many of the possible letters for positions 1 and 3 as possible. But importantly, you first just want to identify the letters, not their positions, which we already know are 1 or 3. Looking at the list above, you can see that we’re talking about C, M, N, P ,W, K, V, G, S, and Z. A lot of letters! You’re doing well if you can find any legal word that has three of these consonants. Four is ideal, but tough to do. When I played this game, my third guess was CHAMP.
The H wasn’t really likely, but this was the best guess I could come up with, covering C, M, and P. Note that using A in this guess wasn’t necessary, but does help provide confirmation of our expectation that A is in position 2. We now know this with 100% certainty because positions 4 and 5 are taken and A has been ruled out of positions 1 and 3.
I hit paydirt with M, but that still didn’t narrow it down enough. It could still be manes, makes, names, manes, mages, mazes, and maybe more I hadn’t thought of. Still too early to be making final guesses. I did another fishing expedition. It was tough to come up with another guess that covered the other remaining consonants (N, W, K, V, G, S, and Z). The best I could do was to cover K and N.
Note that I used vowels that I already knew weren’t in the solution because all I was after was the identity of the remaining consonant. I got lucky and found that it was K. This made the solution 100% known:
Maybe you’re not impressed with a five guess win, but this one could have easily made you run out of guesses if you had tried to make final guesses starting on guess three. Many of the puzzles are like this.
Keeping Notes
I’ve found it can be helpful to use the game as a way to “take notes” about what you’re thinking. For example, suppose you got the puzzle below. I had three letters known from my opening guesses, so I made a “final” guess on guess number 3. Okay, DINKS is a weird word and probably not the solution, but I thought D was probably in position 1 and just made the guess.
Clearly, D is in position 4, so it’s just a matter of making guesses to determine the letter in position 1, right? But before doing that, it’s good to take a moment to figure out how many possibilities there are and if you have enough guesses left to guess the possibilities one at a time.
This is where using the game to take notes comes in. You can enter each possibility for position 1, as follows:
Obviously, this isn’t going to form a valid guess. It’s just keeping track of which possibilities there are and how many possibilities exist. I came up with four (FINDS, MINDS, BINDS, and WINDS), and I entered the starting letter for each of these possibilities. Since there were (at least) four, this told me I didn’t have enough guesses left to guess them one at a time and be sure of solving the puzzle within six guesses. Time to go consonant fishing again.
Taking notes like this on a consonant possibility also helps you come up with a guess that covers as many of the possibilities as you can. After staring at FMBW for a while, I came up with WOMBS, which covered three of the possibilities. It hit on W, after which the solution was 100% known.
When You Get Stuck
Sometimes you are confused by a puzzle and can’t come up with even a single word that fits with the known information. You can always guess something like CHAMP or PINKY that just covers a lot of letters, but this is a last resort. What can help you think about more likely possibilities?
This is another way I use the game board to help me think. I come up with things I’d like to know, or possibilities I’d like to try out, and I enter these on the board with X standing in for unknown letters.
For example, with this puzzle, I had three of the letters, but no positional information known even after three guesses. I decided to try seeing if E could be in position 5, so I entered the pattern below to stimulate thinking along these lines:
After a while, it became clear that this wasn’t a likely pattern. Where did the R go? Obviously a vowel was needed in the middle of the word, but E had already been ruled out in position 3. Was there an E in position 2, or was Y used as a vowel? I couldn’t think of a single way this pattern could work, so I tried a different one.
This pattern included all three known letters in positions where they hadn’t already been ruled out. So if I could come up with even one word that fit this pattern, I would likely get the positional information I needed. I did find one word that fit the pattern, and this turned out to be the solution. It was much easier to come up with this somewhat unusual word by staring at the template pattern with the Xs.
Things To Remember
It’s easy for me to forget that the solution may have repeated letters. It seems like a waste to guess a second copy of a letter when you already know it’s in the puzzle. But repeated letters are a real possibility, so it’s important to include possibilities with repeated letters when you’re coming up with lists of possible solutions.
I also struggle to decide when to guess Y. It’s rarely used as a vowel in the middle of the word, but sometimes is. When it’s used at the end of a word, it can be preceded by a lot of things like L, N, D, or repeated letters like PP, TT or NN. When I do guess it, it’s usually in position 5.
The main time I guess Y is when there doesn’t seem to be enough vowels. However, when there’s not enough vowels, it’s more likely that a repeated copy of a known vowel is part of the solution rather than Y. I guess Y only after repeated vowels have been ruled out.
The other thing I need to remember sometimes is to double check my guesses and make sure that I’m not guessing something I already know to be false. It’s a good practice to scan up the columns before entering your guess. Look to see if the letter you’re guessing has already been guessed in that column. Sometimes you’re forced to make a guess you know is false, but it’s a waste of a guess to do it by accident.
Summary
To summarize, I’ll just give you one more example which combines the techniques described above and shows why you should focus on gaining new information rather than guessing the solution prematurely.
Suppose you got the following information from your opening guesses:
Now playing A again in position 1 would give you zero new information. We need positional information on R and E, and we need information on what other letters are part of the solution.
Here’s what I guessed:
Why is this a good guess? We know it’s not a possible solution, since it doesn’t include A in position 1. E in position 5 doesn’t seem likely either, since we’d need a vowel in position 2, or more likely 3, and it looks like we have all of our vowels already.
Note, however, that this result tells us exactly where E goes with 100% certainty. It must be in position 3 because 1 and 2 are occupied and 4 and 5 have been ruled out.
In the meantime, this guess allowed us to try out two new consonants and gave us the position of R.
What was the answer though? I entered the known information about A, R, and E to see if any words would jump out at me.
Words that start with vowels are difficult for me. I couldn’t think of any candidate solutions at first, until I remembered to consider possible repeated letters. Then the solution came to me.
I hope these tips help you be more successful at solving Wordle and related puzzles and that you feel smart as a result. I still play Wordle and have fun with it.
