Next, I will review two different strategies, the Vowel Strategy and the Frequency Strategy. The 5-letter words constitute just approximately 4.3% of all words in this list. Apparently, the frequency is unimodal with a peak at words with 9 letters. Perhaps unrelated to this little project, but I was curious to find the distribution of words frequency based on number of letters and the following was the result. I will explore this list to hopefully gain more insight into a good strategy for the first word entered into Wordle. After extracting only 5-letter words from this list, I was left with a list of 15,918 words. The file contains 370,103 English words that are single and contain only letters. I found a dataset of such words at this repository on Github. However, a portion of these words are obsolete or may not fall into the category of valid single words that contain only letters (no numbers or symbols). A Closer Look at the Wordsīased on this article on Wikipedia, the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language contains 470,000 entries. In this analysis, I am trying to find a strategy, or rather a word, that can serve this purpose. Better yet, a good strategy for the first entered word would be one that can determine as many letters of the target word as possible with as many correct placements of those letters. Basically, a good strategy for the first entered word would be one that tries to eliminate as many remaining letters as possible.

That is why, we can perhaps talk about a strategy that would provide the best feedback (one with as much information as possible) after the first word is submitted. However, the choice of the first word is independent of the player’s vocabulary or language skills. After feedback on the first word is provided, success would depend on many factors including the players vocabulary and how they can narrow down their next guess based on the feedback. Is there a good strategy once the player starts receiving feedback? Perhaps there is one. However, once the first word is submitted, the player will gain more information on letters involved in the target word, depending on the entered word. Is there a good strategy to play the game? Obviously, prior to entering the first word, the player has no information about the word and it could be one of approximately 15,000 5-letter English words. Rules of Wordle (screenshot by author) A Good Strategy

What is vowel words