Wordle 505 2/6*

I have been playing Wordle for a while, starting about 100 days after it first started. Like a lot of people I wanted to try to solve it in as few guesses as possible which meant having a good starting word. Early on, I found sources that said the best word to start with was CRATE. I put together some of my own statistics by playing older games on the Wordle archive and also seeing how I did with different starting words. The most common letters appearing in Wordle are, in order, E, A, R, O, and T (the next 5 are L, I, S, N, and C) so I decided the best starting word would be ORATE, which uses all 5 of the top letters. At some point, the New York Times bought Wordle and started running it, and since I already had a New York Times games subscription (mostly to play Spelling Bee), I was able to use their Wordlebot analyzer that analyzes how skillful and lucky your guesses are and tells you things like how many likely words are remaining. It does this after you finish the puzzle, so it isn’t cheating. Wordlebot’s current preferred starting word is LEAST which it assigns a skill level of 99. But my own statistics also look at which letters are most commonly placed where and I came up with this table, based on Wordle answers 1 through 465:

Using that table to pick the best positions of letters, LEAST leaves something to be desired. The first letter, L, isn’t ranked in the top 5. E in the second position is 5th, A in the third position is a very good 2nd, S is the fourth spot is not in the top 5 again, and T in the last spot is ranked second. You can do better just by rearranging those same letters to make SLATE. Now S in the first position ranks number 1, L is 4th, A is 2nd, T is 5th, and E is 1st. If you write down the rankings, SLATE is 14251 and the sum of those digits is 13. If you give unranked letters a generous value of 6, then LEAST would be 65262, for a total of 21, nowhere close (lower totals are better). Once I switched from ORATE to SLATE and comparing my answers to Wordlebot’s answers, I generally did get more green squares with SLATE than Wordlebot was getting with LEAST on my first guess even though we were using the same 5 letters. And Wordlebot still gives a skill level of 99 for using SLATE, so they know it is close. But reviewing it after a couple of months of playing SLATE every day, I noticed that CRANE actually ranked out better, 22231, for a total of only 10. However CRANE only gets a skill level of 97, still much higher than the 91 that they give ORATE (ORATE is about 100 words down their list of most skillful starting words). So I thought maybe I should try out CRANE and today, November 6, 2022, with Wordle puzzle number 505, I decided to switch to CRANE.

I got two green squares, meaning the A and E were in the correct place. For my second guess I wanted to use common letters I hadn’t used already, so L, S, and T. With some sense of dread, I returned to my longtime starting word and entered STALE. And I got all green squares! I also realized if I hadn’t switched words today, I would have gotten Wordle in one guess. The Wordle gods had smiled and decided that today they were going to let me solve the puzzle in one guess, the word I had been guessing first every day for months, and I had switched my starting word to CRANE! What a nightmare! I put down my phone disgusted. Then I started thinking. Did I enter STALE or SLATE? I checked again. I had entered STALE as my second guess, not the word I had entered daily until today, SLATE. So even if I hadn’t changed to CRANE today and entered SLATE like always, I still would have gotten it in 2. And then I just had some dumb luck to accidentally enter STALE instead of SLATE as my second guess. But it was some consolation that Wordlebot, who guessed their usual LEAST actually used 3 guesses because their second guess was SLATE.