which options reliably determine lexical expertise?

I’ve always enjoyed solving word puzzles, although until recently the majority of such puzzles that I came across, particularly in newspapers, were annoyingly easy. This is the reason I started to devise my own puzzles in the early 1990s. I created several repeatable formats, examples of which I posted on this blog when I started in 2009 (Wedgewords; Chainwords; Scramble Six), which provided the challenge that I thought was missing from the word puzzles of the day.

This all changed last year, when a friend on Facebook started posting comments about Wordle. Some of his comments were complaints (“they’re using American spelling”), while some were boasts (solving a given puzzle in just two attempts—see below). I was intrigued and decided to check out Wordle for myself. If I were to describe it in a single word, I would say that it is ‘ingenious’.

The object of the game is to guess an unknown five-letter word, and you are allowed six attempts. After each attempt, letters that are in their correct position in the mystery word are highlighted in green, while letters that are contained in the word, but are in the wrong position, are highlighted in yellow. Letters that are not in the word remain black. This is how the system works in a game in which I needed all six guesses:

This is a good example of a poor second guess, which I was lucky to get away with. I should have tried RAISE, which would still have left me with a lot to do, but at least I would have had all the vowels in their correct positions much earlier. You will notice that I started with AUDIO, which contains four of the five vowels, although I’ve been led to believe that this is not the optimum strategy. According to researchers from MIT, the best starting word is SALET, a word that you probably haven’t even heard of (it’s a mediæval military helmet). When I first read this, I couldn’t help but wonder why LEAST, SLATE, STALE and STEAL aren’t equally as good, but apparently SALET has the consonants in their most common positions.

Anyway, I shall continue with AUDIO, at least for the time being. And I also now have standard choices for my second guess. If the only positive result from my first guess is a yellow A:

…a yellow I:

…or a yellow O:

And so on.

If I have no positive results from my first guess, then this is my second guess:

This last example highlights a recurring problem in Wordle: letter combinations that still offer many possibilities.

This is another example of a game where I just succeeded with my final attempt, even though I had three greens from my second guess:

There are much worse possibilities than this. For example, there are nine possible words ending in –IGHT, eight possibilities ending in –OUND, and seven possibilities ending in –ATCH. One of the four games I’ve lost since I started playing Wordle involved the word FOUND. At the time, I felt that it was unfair to include such words in the list of possible solutions, but I’ve since worked out a strategy for dealing with this particular problem.

Obviously, the chance that I can guess the word at my first attempt is zero—unless I switch to a strategy that involves selecting a different first word each time—but even to succeed in two guesses involves a great deal of luck. Here are three examples:

I should point out that the ‘official’ Wordle, owned by the New York Times, offers just one game each day—this is the one I play. It’s also worth noting that there are two lists associated with the official version: a list of possible solutions (determined in advance), and a list of valid guesses. As I understand it, the list of possible solutions excludes plurals ending in s and the past tense of verbs ending in –ed (e.g., added, rated). There was a controversy recently on the Reddit subforum devoted to Wordle over the word of the day: RIPER. The objection was that comparative adjectives should also be excluded from the official solutions list. Incidentally, this word broke my longest winning streak to date (106).

Anyway, that’s Wordle. If you’ve never played it but would like to try, simply google ‘Wordle’ and choose the game offered by the New York Times—there are quite a few clones, some of which offer unlimited play, and there are also sites that offer Wordle-like games with longer words. I tried some of these, but the five-letter version is the most interesting.