In Wordle, a linguistics expert has revealed what he thinks is the greatest word to start with. There is a decent chance you have heard of Wordle, the popular new game in which you have six chances to guess a word – but if you have not, here is a quick rundown: You are supposed to predict what the five-letter word of the day might be. After that, you will tell whether the letters you have chosen are in the word and if they are in the appropriate place. Green letters are in the right place, whereas yellow characters are in the right place but in the wrong spot. The letters turn gray if they are incorrect.
The game’s core rules are similar to those of the board game Mastermind, in which you must guess the colors of pins chosen by an opponent. Similarly, the ideal strategy for beating the game is to maximize the amount of knowledge you gain with each turn. In Mastermind, for example, it is ideal to use colors you did not use on your first turn on your second turn to figure out which colors are in play.
Unlike Mastermind, Wordle has 26 possible letters in each slot (thanks to the alphabet for the added challenge), but the premise stays the same: if you want to win, you should strive to learn as much knowledge as possible in each turn. It is possible to figure out which letters are more likely to appear because there are a limited number of five-letter words that can be used (they are not arranged in any particular order).
You can increase your chances of gaining information for your next guess by using letters that are more likely to appear. “You need to take into account the frequency of letters in English if you want the highest probability of getting the first word or the second word right in Wordle,” Dr Danny Hieber, a research linguist at the University of Alberta Language Technology Lab who goes by the TikTok username Linguistic Discovery, explained. “I’ve seen ‘tears,’ which is rather nice. I’ve seen’stare,’ is also a nice one. However, as a linguist, I urge that you choose the term ‘irate’ as your first word in Wordle.”
“So that’s my proposal,” the linguist said, explaining that the most common vowels in English are E, A, and I, while the most common consonants are T and R. Is he correct? According to various statistical assessments undertaken by Wordle enthusiasts in recent weeks, this is not the case. Several mathematicians have attempted to determine the best opening moves. For their investigation, Redditor adeadhead looked at the occurrences of letters in the Stanford Graphbase five-letter words list and calculated how many times each letter appears in all potential five-letter words.
