Written by Joseph Holevinski, Converge multimedia journalism intern and Senior at Gwinnett School of Math, Science & Technology (GSMST)
If you love word games or daily brain puzzles, then you have probably heard of Wordle. Wordle is a word game that has recently grown in popularity and is now currently owned by the New York Times. The objective of the game is to guess a random five letter word in six attempts by inputting words and then receiving feedback on which letters are in the correct spot, which letters are in the word but are not in the correct spot and which letters don’t appear in the word at all.
There has been a wide variety of words that have been suggested to get key letters that are most likely to appear in words. However, with so many strategies and the words you have to guess ranging from simple to complex, it’s hard to know which word sequence works best.
There are two main strategies when trying to solve a daily Wordle that seem to lead to the most success: using your first attempts to utilize as many different letters as possible or starting with one word and doing words that use all the information gained from prior guesses.
The first strategy is my personal favorite because it has a more likely success of getting the word; however, it reduces the likelihood that you get the word on less attempts. The best principle to have in mind when using this strategy is to try and get as many different letters on the table as possible and focus mostly on consonants. This will give you a more likely chance of finding all the right letters in the word, whether or not they are in the right place, allowing you to have a more honed-in guess on your last one or two attempts. For this, I recommend words like STORM, FIGHT or CHALK because they utilize a lot of commonly found letters in words.
The second strategy is also a really strong strategy and has a greater likelihood that you can solve the word faster, but it also has the risk of causing you to not get the word by your final attempt. For this, I would recommend starting with vowel-prominent words like ARISE, OCEAN or IRATE. This will let you know what vowels you will be working with, then you can go from there and build your guesses based on any other letters you have confirmed or other consonants that are in the word.
Utilizing one or both of these strategies will assist you in figuring out some of the toughest words with relative ease. Then, you can go and flex to your friends and family how you got the Wordle faster than everyone else!
