Winning Wordle: The Best Starting Words To Use and Why | Mashable

We're not here to judge how you play

words

. Maybe you're like us, picking a random five-letter word from the back of your brain and seeing where it takes you, but you're the kind of person who needs to win. Any circumstances, welcome to the Thunderdome, we're here to talk about Wordle's

starting

word strategy, which is the only way to play Wordle that doesn't feel like outright cheating, so let's get into it. You have 26 letters in those alphabets. five plus the letter y are sometimes vowels, the building blocks of most

words

, so at a very basic level, any combination of five letters that helps you rule out more vowels from the start will narrow down the possible answers.

With that in mind, we can immediately select some ideal

starting

words, there are others, but since audio and Ouija cover four vowels, you won't know if any yellow or green letter appears twice, but at least you can eliminate some critical letters from the beginning, that It is enough for most people. but it's also not that simple since not all letters are created equal, yes vowels appear in basically all words but some are more or less common, the same goes for consonants and then there is also the question of word dictionary, there are more than ten thousand words.

The game will recognize guesses as allowed, but there is a much smaller list of words, just a few thousand, that qualify as possible solutions and the New York Times even narrowed that list of solutions when it acquired World, so while you could use a More obscure word like oreo, plural form of aureus an ancient Roman gold coin for guessing, will not be the answer of the day if using heavy vowels is not enough and you want to cover some of the more common consonants also raise is an ideal initial word as covers the three most common vowels and the two most common consonants as they appear in dictionaries what's the

best

word starter really if you don't want to risk feeling like you're cheating you might want to stop looking now okay cool .

If you're still looking at the strategies we've discussed so far, they'll give you a head start, but if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, a mathematician and computer scientist named Grant Sanderson made an excellent video on the topic in which Sanderson applied his knowledge. He information theory to Wordle and coded some test programs that measure things like letter frequency to determine the

best

of the best starting words. It's a dense 30 minutes of explanation that's heavy on math talk, but Sanderson's friendly demeanor and willingness to take the time to break down complex ideas makes it a must-see for Wordle fans, so yeah, go watch it , but the final conclusion leaves us with crane as the best Wordle initial word, but don't get too confident, it's not that simple because Sanderson's breakdown focuses on letter frequency.

Crane is just the first stage of information gathering, it's only better if you use what you know about the right and wrong letters in that first word to inform a perfect second guess. Is your head spinning, but are you ready to guess a random answer again? word every time wait because we're not even close to being done yet sanderson released another video a week after the first titled oh wait actually the best word opener isn't crane turns out there was a small bug in his original test program but it says From the Initially, the bug affects a very small percentage of cases, so it doesn't completely undermine all of the lessons in the first video without getting into too much heavy math.

The error relates specifically to solutions that have multiples of the same letter and how

wordle

handles that Sanderson felt the need to post a second video because, although very few of the conclusions from the original video change, the final conclusion is effective considering that Sanderson's updated ideal starting word is salad, an alternative spelling for salad, which was a type of helmet used during the Middle Ages that said that trace and box work almost equally well, especially since both are actually possible solutions of words, but note that one of the most important conclusions of all this mathematics is actually very simple, your first assumption is only strong in the context of the conjectures that follow, that's the whole Wordle game in a nutshell, but there are another school of thought on how to approach resolving the Wordle leash.

Here we go instead of playing it as intended, using each previous guess to inform the next one. one where you could stick to the letter frequency game and try to discard the most common letters, consonants and vowels from the start, regardless of the clues you get. This approach effectively wastes your initial stretch of guesswork on locked options that are meant to limit you. Write down the number of possible letters you have to work with, just know that if you play Wordle on hard mode, this strategy won't work, as every guess Successive guess must include any letter that the previous guess confirmed to be in the solution. the best starting word that isn't that difficult in all of math, this is all getting ridiculously complicated for a five letter word game for those who don't want to dive into the world of math.

Youtuber Bentilek has a short and sweet breakdown of his first the ratio of starting strategies, then men and then luck, that's it, with those three options you will have narrowed down the list of possible letters to the point that discovering the solution with your final guesses becomes much easier, there is a sure

winning

strategy for everyday puzzles. and there are other similar combinations that could work like scaly guide and thorn, but the premise is the same, although you are narrowing down the list of possible letters that could appear in the solution by casting the widest possible net alphabetically speaking with your first three guesses.

So there you have it, there is no single perfect starting guess for Wordle, there are many, you can keep guessing random words first, but if you want to win at any cost, I hope this summary of what works best gets you closer to climbing that daily streak . in the three digits