Lately, discussing the daily Wordle has become about as common as chatting about the weather. For anybody who’s been living under a rock the last few months, Wordle is a daily word puzzle owned by the New York Times which invites users to guess a five-letter word within 6 attempts. Sounds easy, right? But when the game throws out a ‘tacit’ ‘quiet’ curveball, these tips and tricks will ensure you win your group chat Wordle league and keep that 30-day streak.
1. The First Word
This one may seem obvious but, after watching a friend guess ‘penne’ as their first word, I have to clarify – don’t use a word with a double letter for your starting word. This prevents you from ruling out a range of letters and means there is less chance of some letters being right! Although some recommend using words with medium frequency letters (more on that later) I prefer to stick to words with lots of vowels since they will always be present in any word. Try irate, adieu or alien.
2. Medium Frequency Letters
Arguably words with medium frequency letters like g m r and n are best suited for a wordle attempt, as fewer words contain them yet they are still reasonably common. This means that, if you do figure out they’re in a word, your options for your next guess are significantly narrower than if you find out that your word has an ‘e’ or ‘a’ in it. If vowel heavy words aren’t working for you try ‘shock’ ‘grump’ or ‘drink’.
3. Elimination words
Wordle loves to catch us out with words just like catch, which are annoyingly similar to latch patch match batch etc. To ensure you don’t waste six attempts guessing words that don’t quite make the cut, try using an elimination word like ‘blimp’ to rule out a selection of potential first letters in one swoop.
