ORATE is another good one if you want to get 3 vowels off the board with your first guess.
And I agree - my second guess often utilizes a bit of learning from the first guess. Today I got 3 of the letters out of my first guess, all out of order. My second guess went entirely with different letters, and gave me a fourth letter. Which basically eliminated all the other possible words, so I got it on try #3.
That brings up an interesting point. It seems that the website everyone is using is based in the UK. At some point, are most of us Yanks going to miss because the answer is an unfamiliar British term or has a peculiar British spelling? For example, I suspect that the word 'craic' is more familiar among Brits than Americans.
Yes, his "reformed mode of spelling" was quite interesting...very hard for me to decipher now that I know actual English (see example below). At least, he succeeded with Daniel Webster in getting rid of silly "u's" in spellings. Interestingly, I have a book about teaching kids to read and it makes some "adjustments" to letters to make it more phonetic, including a new symbol or two for sounds that don't exist with a single letter. Not too different that Franklin in its goal, but the execution is much different and it's much closer to how we do things.
https://archive.org/details/politica...p?view=theater
Reformed Mode of Spelling.jpg
This really doesn’t answer the “why” part but for those who don’t know, Wordle publishes downloadable lists of all acceptable guess words and and all possible solution words. (They aren’t the same.)
On a related note I did consider “soare” at one point. I created an Excel spreadsheet of their possible solution words. From that I created frequency distributions for letter use overall and by position (1st letter, 2nd letter…, 5th letter). Using that info I noticed the SOARE letter combination as a great initial guess but skipped over it because I assumed it wasn’t a word.
(Thinking back I’m pretty certain I HAD seen someone else mentioning SOARE before but forgot about it until just now.)
Hard at work making beautiful things.
After having back to back days of getting it on the 4th and 5th guess, I was probably a bit gun-shy and wanted to get back to getting it right on the 3rd try again .
If I get back to getting it on the third try repeatedly (and if I get 3-4 of the letters on the 1st guess again), I'll probably start going for it on guess #2.
That was me. I don't enter CLAIM unless TERNS (now RENTS) gets me nowhere. I played one (not Wordle, but on this site) where RENTS, CLAIM, and BOUGH got me a total of one yellow letter, but I still solved it on the fourth guess:
hellowordl01.jpg
I have a feeling that if Wordle ever does the word PUPPY, it would break so many people.
Today was my second try. Yesterday I finally managed to get the word on the sixth attempt. Today was much easier, and I got it on the third try. Thinking about the methodology overnight following my first experience, I decided to use the word "TEARS" as my opening "bid," since it incorporates some of the most commonly used letters. It would have been fruitless yesterday, of course; but today it facilitated a quick solution.
Wordle 221 3/6
⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Four again, just can't quite make it to three
Wordle 221 4/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
third try
Wordle 221 3/6*
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Wordle 221 4/6*
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩🟨🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
I think I play differently from most. I'm not really trying to optimize guesses, and I intentionally start with a different word each time I play (or at least a different word than I've used in recent memory). I mostly just think of it as a throwaway puzzle that's going to take me no more than five minutes. I'm happy with a quick four guesses.