Pass the time with purpose when you open Wordle by jumping on the best tips, hints, and hacks to get the highest scores, the quickest answers, and advice on words you should never bother with
There’s nothing like it on your commute to work, or once the kids are dropped at school. A coffee in hand, sit back and deep dive into the daily Wordle game on your smartphone. In fact, just two years ago, the game had on average 2.2 million daily players aged 15+ over a one-week period.
Like any game though, there are best – and worst – strategies for playing, and logging on armed with this information could see you reign as champion over your family and friends.
If you’re simply trying to win within the allotted six guesses, there are hacks around which words are best to start with. The top three words to play are ‘adept’, ‘clamp’ and ‘plaid’. Using any of these three words will yield an average success rate in winning the game of 98.79%, 98.75%, and 98.75%.
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‘Derby’, ‘flank’, ‘ghost’, ‘winch’ and ‘jumps’ are also known as ‘magic words’, too.
Give the word ‘crane’ a go to bank a 99/100 for skill if you’re after points – it awards the highest score. However, ‘slate’, ‘trace’, ‘crate’, ‘caret’ and ‘carte’ also score highly, so any of those six would be a great choice for your starting Wordle word.
For a two-seed word strategy, start with ‘cones’ and follow with ‘trial’ . They lead to success for just over 96% of target words with an average game length of 3.68 rounds. For a three-seed word strategy, start with ‘hates’, followed by ’round’, followed by ‘climb’.
There are other hacks serious gamers can focus on, too.
To solve Wordle as efficiently as possible, try words that include the letters e, t, a, i, o, n, s, h, and r ; these are the most common letters in the English language.
Another great trick is to begin with words that start with the letters t, a, o, d, and w; again, these are the most common starting letters in English. The letter ‘e’ is the most common letter across the whole game.
Also, following your first guess with a word that contains entirely different letters may also help you find success because part of the game is about the process of elimination.
According to CNET, the following words were the hardest Wordle answers of 2022 – ‘parer’, ‘foyer’, ‘catch’, ‘watch’, ‘mummy’, ‘cater’, ‘coyly’ and ‘trite’.
Players should also remember that Wordle follows very specific rules when it comes to the type of words it will use as answers. The dictionary of valid answers excludes plural nouns that end in S or ES as well as past tense verbs that end in ED.
Wordle words rarely end in S – it is the 15th most popular last letter appearing less than 2% of the time, compared to 31% of the full set of five-letter words.
And never use words like use plurals, proper names, or place names. For example words, Peter and Paris are out.
According to the New York Times, the most popular starting words are ‘adieu’ or ‘audio’ because both words consist of many vowels, they quickly make clear which letters are in the solution word.
And finally, two tips that serious players follow. Always start with a word that has 3, 4, or 5 vowels and use your second try to confirm as many letters as possible. Good luck!
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