Wordle: what the letter statistics say about your first guess.
Five letters, six guesses. Over 15% of answers start with S, vowels dominate the middle, and the words almost never end in S.
Varchas KoushikFounder · Storyteller & Learning Experience Designer
Five letters, six guesses — that's right, I'm talking about Wordle in story #28. With Wordle becoming more and more popular, I thought: why not read some cool math about it?
To boost the odds of guessing each day's word, it makes sense to choose words with letters that occur frequently in English. No surprise there. Well, here you go (spoiler alert):
- Starting letter: over 15% of Wordle's words of the day start with S. Words starting with C, B, T, P, A or F each appear in more than 5% of answers.
- Second letter: A, O, R, E, I, L, U and H each appear as the second letter in more than 5% of answers.
- Third letter: A, I, O, E, U, R and N each appear in more than 5%.
- In both the second and third positions, vowels dominate.
- By a wide margin, the most common fourth letter is E — the fourth letter in one in seven answers.
- E, Y, T, R, L, H, N and D all appear as the last letter in more than 5% of answers.
- Wordle words rarely end in S — less than 2% of the time.
For a lot more math and tricks for guessing five-letter words, read the sources below.
First published on LinkedIn as Math Storytelling #28
Further reading
Written by
Varchas Koushik
Founder · Storyteller & Learning Experience Designer
Founder of All Things Classroom. 10,000+ hours facilitating sessions with students across age groups and geographies; writes about game-based learning, story-driven teaching and what's possible when a lesson is designed like an experience instead of a script.
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