Maybe Wordle’s March 15 response should be CELEBRATE. Wordle, the New York Times-owned online puzzle, is celebrating its 1,000th game. Times bought the game from creator Josh Wardle to seven figures in 2022.
THE the newspaper will celebrate from March 14, although Game 1000 will take place on Friday March 15. The Empire State Building will be lit in Wordle’s colors: green, yellow and white. And if you’re in New York, you can get special treats from March 14 to March 27, with a ton offered on March 15 itself.
I’ve written a lot about Wordle — from best starting words has a useful two-step strategy has controversial word changes. I even rounded What I learned from playing the hit online word puzzle for a full year. But recently, I haven’t changed my strategy much. You see, I found a favorite Wordle starter and I just can’t give it up.
The Wordle seed words methodology is very personal. One person told me that she simply looked at the room she was in and chose a five-letter object to use as her starting word: hello, COUCH, or FLESH. At first I followed many Wordle readers and chose FAREWELL because it told me where four vowels could be.
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FAREWELL
In 2022, the Times reviewed user data and found that GOODBYE was one of the top five guesses, used by an average of 5% of users each day, or millions of players. But I decided it was the consonants I really needed to refine from the start. Vowels mostly take care of themselves.
AUDIO
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also loves Wordle and says he and a group of friends share their daily scores to see who comes out on top. In a video, Gates shows and talks about his playing method, and he starts with AUDIO – very similar to FAREWELL, just replace the E with the O. Gates may be a billionaire genius, but the E appears more in English. words than O. So really, he should choose ADIEU rather than AUDIO if he wants to find vowels.
ROAD
But then I started to get interested in the science of letter frequency. There is a wonderfully geeky explanation on Reddit why ROATE, a financial conditionis the best word based on letter popularity (but it will never give you a winning result, as it is not on the list of the original 2315 Wordle words – a list which has since been slightly modified by the Times). Many people know that Wheel of Fortune players like to choose a combination of the letters RSTLNE due to their high frequency. These are good strategies, but they just didn’t work for me.
FORM
This all led to my favorite starting word in Wordle, TRAIN. It uses three of those Wheel of Fortune letters, plus two popular vowels, it’s surely on Wordle’s list of 2,315 words, and it’s easy to remember. This also places certain letters in prime locations. T is a common first letter (maybe THE most common first letter), and R is good second because many words start with BR, TR, CR, DR, etc. N is also a fairly acceptable ending letter.
I would say there is no better objective starting word, and that makes it more fun. ROATE and ORATE may have very popular letters, but I’ve found that TRAIN often catches me two or three letters, usually with at least one in the right place. TRAIN is also a satisfying word to remember and type, and the results are pretty solid, time and time again. (A friend prefers TRAIL, and it’s good for her, but N appears more frequently than L.)
Another reason I love TRAIN? According to several lists, T is the most used first letter in English words. So there’s a greater chance that not only will the word have a T, but it will turn green, meaning T is the first letter of the word. The sooner I know the first letter of the answer, the better.
CLOSE
I’m still not perfectly happy with my second standard word, which is FIRM. It certainly brings together five more popular letters, without any repetition. But I don’t like it. Often this gives me no correct letters, which does nothing other than eliminate five letter choices. It’s useful, but rather discouraging. Maybe I need a better second word, one that uses E, O, and S, but hits more often. The jury is still out.
Make it fly
But since I discovered TRAIN, I’ve decided that my second word is much less important than a simple second guess strategy.
Once TRAIN nails a few letters for me, my method of play immediately changes. If any letters are green, meaning they’re already in the right place, that’s a big help. But it is the yellow letters, that is, they are in a different place in the words, that really help in choosing the second word. I mentally play with these yellow letters, looking for places they seem to belong.
As long as TRAIN has given me some options, I am usually able to progress my game by juggling these letters on my second guess, often scoring a victory on guess #3.
Two lessons to remember
If you’re in this place – you have some yellow letters that need to be correctly placed, but you can’t seem to find a word that uses them – here are two tips:
Vowels can start a word
First, remember that many words start with vowels and Wordle seems to choose them frequently.
Green letters can be repeated
Also note that letters may appear twice. So even if a word has a green T (or whatever) in a specific place, don’t stop thinking about that letter. There could be another T (or even two more). More than once during my first few days of playing, I made the mistake of ignoring a green letter, thinking I already figured that one out, and forgetting that it might be again in the word.