- Joined
- Sep 23, 2018
Wordle is a word game which has blown up in various corners of the Internet. So let's pollute this one with it too.
Here's a tl;dr of the rules:
General strategy is to try to use words with the most common letters in English first to check whether they're in the word or not, even if you have to use a word which doesn't have a letter in a correct position - very early on it's more important to verify or rule out certain letters than it is to guess the word properly. The most common letters in English are the vowels (especially A and E) and the consonants C, M, N, L, R, S, and T - if you've watched too much Wheel of Fortune you know this already. Once you've done two or three guesses to eliminate or confirm letters, you'll have better luck making intentional guesses to guess the answer.
Here's another tip: Watch out for cases where there are more than one occurrences of the same letter in a word. Just because you've guessed a letter correctly in one position doesn't mean it won't appear again in another position, so don't automatically exclude "green letters" from other positions in your guesses.
As this is a pretty simple idea for a game, clones are popping up everywhere, just like in the heyday of 2048. Apple has been sweeping up the App Store for monetized rip-offs which use the Wordle name, but the creator doesn't seem to mind free clones on the web, like this one in Hebrew and this one that uses prime numbers. Please share any other interesting variants you come across.
Or just gloat about how quickly you solved today's puzzle and totally didn't cheat.
Here's a tl;dr of the rules:
- You are trying to guess a five-letter dictionary word.
- After entering a word (it must be in the game's dictionary, so random letters don't count), the game will highlight any letters which are in the correct position in green, and highlight any letters that are in the target word but in the wrong position in yellow. For example, if the target word is "BRIEF" and you enter "BRAIN," the B and R will be highlighted in green, and the I will be yellow. For another example, open the spoiler to see how I solved today's puzzle in four tries (though I got pretty lucky on the third), though be aware it spoils the answer for today's (January 23) puzzle:
- You don't have to use the goofy on-screen keyboard if you have a real physical keyboard. However, the keyboard will highlight letters which have been found in the puzzle in green or yellow, or "dim out" letters which were not found in the puzzle. That's helpful for identifying which letters you've yet to try.
- You have six chances to correctly guess the word. Pass or fail, you'll get a new word tomorrow.
General strategy is to try to use words with the most common letters in English first to check whether they're in the word or not, even if you have to use a word which doesn't have a letter in a correct position - very early on it's more important to verify or rule out certain letters than it is to guess the word properly. The most common letters in English are the vowels (especially A and E) and the consonants C, M, N, L, R, S, and T - if you've watched too much Wheel of Fortune you know this already. Once you've done two or three guesses to eliminate or confirm letters, you'll have better luck making intentional guesses to guess the answer.
Here's another tip: Watch out for cases where there are more than one occurrences of the same letter in a word. Just because you've guessed a letter correctly in one position doesn't mean it won't appear again in another position, so don't automatically exclude "green letters" from other positions in your guesses.
As this is a pretty simple idea for a game, clones are popping up everywhere, just like in the heyday of 2048. Apple has been sweeping up the App Store for monetized rip-offs which use the Wordle name, but the creator doesn't seem to mind free clones on the web, like this one in Hebrew and this one that uses prime numbers. Please share any other interesting variants you come across.
Or just gloat about how quickly you solved today's puzzle and totally didn't cheat.
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