Wordle is the trendy game that everyone is talking about, the pastime that consists of guessing a five-letter word in less than six attempts. Every day there is a new word to decipher and millions of users in Spain share their results on social networks to see who has been the fastest.
For the clueless, what is Wordle? Wordle is an online game that does not require registration and is available through its website. We must guess a word in six attempts, a word of six letters. We introduce the first word and three different things can happen with each of the letters that make it up: if the letter is correct it will appear in green, if the letter is in that word but you have placed it out of place it will appear in yellow. Finally, if you have written a letter that is not in the word it will appear in grey. But what words are the best to start with in Wordle? Spelling the first word correctly will help us to guess it as soon as possible using as few attempts as possible.
The best word to win in Wordle
Starting well is essential if we want to guess it as soon as possible and many users ask what is the best word to win in Wordle. But Esteban Moro, a researcher at the Carlos III University of Madrid and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has found an algorithm that is capable of solving 99% of the 206 challenges that Wordle is facing right now. An infallible algorithm but it has a problem: it is not applicable to Spanish.
The algorithm has been created using a game for research. The researcher created a game with the same rules and with more than 12,000 five-letter words. All these words, yes, were in English. Thanks to this game he was able to find the best word to start in English: aeros. Eros has the most common vowels (a and e) and the two most common consonants: r and s. Once this word is entered, the letters are almost resolved and the program was able to achieve 90% of the results in less than five attempts. In total, the average was 4.7 attempts using aeros as the word.
I wrote a simple blog post about how to play (and 99% win) Wordle with R https://t.co/stb33cBDDn The simple strategy is to exploit the bias in Wordle answers towards more frequent words in English, combined with a smart choice for the initial guess (“orate”). Enjoy! #RStats
– Esteban Moro (@estebanmoro) January 11, 2022
As the attempts increased, Moro continued to refine his strategy. For example, he discovered that the T appeared more times than the S so he had to find a word that would allow the use of these five letters. Which one? “Orate”, as he explained in his own twitter account on January 11. Using “orate” as the initial word, Wordle won in 99% of the cases.
best word in Spanish
And in Spain? What word should we use? The vowels that appear most often in Spanish words are E and A with more than 12% of the total. In addition, the most repeated consonants are usually S, R, N, D, L and C…
Bearing this in mind and varying depending on what we need to find out, there are some words that are good as a start in Wordle and will help you. Words that contain the maximum possible number of these letters and that follow a scheme that is normally consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant. Although this can change a lot and will depend on what we have to guess. But it will make our work easier when it comes to always finding the result in a few attempts.
Words that may be useful are:
- come out
- They dry
- Dry off
- Fishing line
- sedate
- To be
- Renal
- Born
- swim
- cease
- Dinner
- Celar
- Cells
- Dinners
- dogs
- cases
Etc. Once we have the most frequent letters placed or we know if they are there or not, we must try other of the most common ones in Spanish. Among the vowels, the order would be O, I and finally U. In the case of consonants we should start by trying others like M, P, T…
Although this trick may vary, some of these words are an excellent option to succeed in Wordle and quickly guess each word, although it will be a matter of time before an algorithm appears applied to Spanish that tells us how we should make the most of all our attempts .
