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Gabriella Ferlita
Love it or loathe it, Wordle has been on both our minds and lips ever since the game gained a huge amount of traction in recent moments.
One of the biggest debates surrounding the viral game is whether users have a specific tactic for decoding the word of the day, or whether they make a random guess and hope for the best.
Many users aim to try common letters in the game like vowels and the consonant ‘S’ in their first go in order to rule them out or see if they’re potentially included in the word. But is this the best way to go about your six tries?
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Well, LADbible has enlisted the help of Dr Kat Gupta, a lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at The University of Roehampton, London, for their best Wordle hints, tricks and hacks.
If your go-to first word on Wordle is one that includes many vowels, it’s bad news.
“Ideally, you don't want to start with lots of vowels,” Dr Gupta tells us.
“‘A’, ‘E’, ‘I’, ‘O’ and ‘U’ are very common letters and as such, even if you get a vowel in the right place, it won't narrow down your options as much as you'd like it to.”
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They continue: “For example, the letter ‘E’ occurs in the second position in over 1500 words ranging from begot to heard to least to melon. It's going to take a lot of time to work through these, and even longer if you don't know which position E is in!”
The same principle applies to “some frequent consonants like ‘S’”.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to use super obscure letters instead, though.
“On the other hand, infrequent letters like Q and Z might also not give you enough information,” they tell us.
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“These occur infrequently and are therefore less likely to appear in the word, so you end up using up all your tries without getting a correct letter.”
It’s also important to steer clear of repeated letters, particularly a double ‘L’ or ‘E’ within a word. These “will tell you whether an ‘L’ is present or not… But if that letter isn’t present you’ve missed a chance to see whether a different letter is present”.
The best tactic for starting Wordle, in Dr Gupta’s opinion, is to use a word with medium-frequency consonants that “are likely to give you the most information”.
“These help you fill in - or rule out - less common but not really unusual letters and then you can build on these.
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“Words containing letters like G, L, M, and R are as good a place to start as any.”
Referring to specific words to start with, they say: “I would be inclined to start with something like ‘Grump’ or ‘Drink’ to get a nice spread of medium frequency consonants.”