Background:

Recently, a game named “Wordle” has become increasingly popular. Wordle is a free daily internet game where you get six attempts to guess a five letter word. Everyone in the world gets the same word to guess every day, and only one word comes out per day. It has become a competition between everyone who plays it, with people posting their results daily. 

How to play: 

First you get a random word guess, and the letters will turn yellow, green, or grey. A grey letter means that the letter is not in the final word. A yellow letter means that the letter is somewhere in the word. A green letter means that the letter is in the final word and is in the right location. In the example below, “T” and “E” are not used in the final word, “R” and “A” are, and “D” is the final letter of the final word. 

By process of elimination, you are able to decide what letters go in which box to figure out the final puzzle.

Random Guesses:

At the beginning of the Wordle, you have to pick a random guess in hopes to accumulate some letters. But some people’s random guesses are better than others…

After surveying The Talon, I found some of the best (and worst) random guesses. The strategy is to use the most popular words in the alphabet (e, t, a, i, o, n, s, h, and r), because those words are most likely to be in the final puzzle. 

My random guess is always “Tread”, because it contains two vowels and four of the nine most used letters. Some other first guesses are: 

“Queen” – a bad guess because Q and U are not commonly used letters, and the double letter takes away an opportunity to find a letter in the puzzle. 

“There” – Similar to the word “queen”, “there” is a bad starting word because it has repeated letters.

“Rates” – This is probably the best guess, because there are no repeat letters and all letters in this word are the most commonly used letters 

“Adieu” – This is Ms. Hurt’s starting word – has four vowels in it.

Why?

Wordle has become the newspaper of our generation, people do it first thing in the morning and then talk about it throughout the day. The unifying factor of Wordle is that everyone gets the same word everyday; it’s not an independent game that you can play alone, but a social game that you can compete with your friends. If you don’t already, you should start playing Wordle,  but be warned: If you spoil it for someone else, then you might get in trouble with the die-hard players. 

Play Wordle here: 

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/