10+ Best Wordle Strategy & Best Starting Words to Ace Your Score
Looking for best wordle strategy to ace your score? Not to worry as we will discuss wordle strategies and best starting words to help you start on the right foot and make sure you win every game.
What is Wordle?
If you’ve been living underground for a while, this question is valid, but we’re pretty sure you haven’t been underground in the last few months and have checked your Twitter once in a while.
We’re even more confident that you’ve seen little black, green, and yellow Tetris boxes all across your Twitter feed. This may appear confusing to the uninitiated, however these boxes are players displaying their Wordle scores.
Wordle is a five-letter guessing game that is popular all over the world. Josh Wardle created the game after being fascinated by classic word games such as Jotto, Lingo, and Mastermind. Wordle was purchased by the New York Times after its meteoric rise.
How Wordle is Played
You could be wondering how to play the game and tweet your score. The game’s rules are fairly straightforward. Every day, you must guess a new 5-letter word that is shared by all players worldwide. But keep in mind that you only have six chances to get it right.
Players type in their guesses, as shown in the image above. Should you correctly guess a letter and place it in the correct position, it will be highlighted in green.
If the guessed letter appears in the correct answer but is not in the correct position, it will be highlighted in yellow; if a letter does not appear in the correct answer at all, it will be highlighted in red.
Words to Begin Wordle with
As suggested in the following section, there are numerous ways to select the first word. There are many simple and straightforward approaches to this, beginning with commonly used 5-letter words, for example:
- TARES
- SENOR
- NOTES
- AROSE
- ALTER
- RESIN
- IRATE
- ALERT
- LATER
Wordle Strategies in Details
Now that you know how to play Wordle, let’s get into the basics of Wordle strategies:
1. Don’t Attempt to Guess the Word on Your First Turn
A strategy is required to solve a Wordle puzzle successfully. Don’t charge in with all guns aflame without first considering your options. When playing Wordle, logic should be your go-to.
Wordle has thousands of potential solutions, so the chances of you guessing it are slim to none. Instead, consider your first word to be a sacrifice; this is the first move in your strategy to hit Wordle with a higher score, as you are not wasting your first turn.
2. Use the Strategy of Common Letters (Consonants)
Apart from vowels, some letters in our colloquial English, such as S, R, C, H, and K, appear frequently, and this rationally extends to Wordle guesses as well.
You can easily crack consonants by using words like SNORT. Vowels may become fairly easy to guess once you know which consonants to use.
If you don’t want your strategy to be too extreme, you can start with a combination of consonants and vowels. Using words such as TREAD.
3. Your Guess Should Include “Popular” Letters
With the foregoing in mind, the best option for your first sacrificial word is one that contains popular letters.
This strategy eliminates or confirms five of the most common letters in the English language, making it an excellent strategy for beating a trial-and-error word game.
Get those more statistically likely letters out of the way if you want a high Wordle score.
4. Vowels Strategy
Vowels are the most commonly used letters in everyday conversation, and they appear more commonly in all Wordle responses. As a result, using more vowels in your guesses makes logical sense. Words like ADIEU may assist you in cracking all the vowels at once.
5. Take Your Time with the Turns
So you’ve figured out your first word. What are your next steps? Nothing. At least not for a while. Remember, you only have 24 hours to find a successful solution, so take a break to think about your next strategic move.
Consider how many letters you still have to guess. Are there any words that immediately come to mind when you use successfully guessed/placed letters, as opposed to those you have yet to eliminate?
Before taking your second turn, mentally narrow down your options; you’ll have ample time to fuss over those letters.
6. Don’t be Afraid to Repeat the Same Letter
Both BANAL and ABBEY are recent Wordle solutions. They are comprised of examples of the same letter appearing twice, as you can see. So, just because you include one green A in your solution does not rule out the possibility of another.
Remember that your green (or yellow) letter tile may well repeat somewhere else in the solution with the exact same letter, so include this in your mental alphabet aerobics.
7. Experiment with Other Word Games
As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. There are numerous Wordle clones that enable you to play as many games as you want. There are also numerous other word games available that will help you improve your vocabulary.
Okay, so it might not help you guess faster, at least not directly, however the more than five-letter words you remember, the more options you have for mentally crunching through potential solutions.
8. Eliminate Letters
Eliminating letters is one of the good factor principles to follow when guessing. If your first letter is R, the chances of your second letter being E, I, O, A, or U are very high. As a result, you could eliminate some of them and reduce your options to one correct letter in as few as one or two guesses.
9. Remember Wordle Uses US Spellings
Correct. This won’t matter to an American reader, but for those who don’t speak American English, remembering that Wordle uses US spellings could mean the difference between a broken or continued streak of successful solving.
This recently perplexed literally every British English speller on the planet, when Wordle used FAVOR as an answer to one of its puzzles, erasing continuous runs globally in one fell swoop.
9. Don’t Forget the Lesser-Known Letters
Yes, we mentioned using statistically popular letters during your first turn (or first couple of turns if you employ the same strategy for your second go), but don’t overlook the less statistically popular letters.
You know the likes of Q, Z, and X, which make everyone groan when they’re pulled from a Scrabble tile bag.
If you’re running out of likely letter/word combinations, don’t overlook words containing these odd letters; QUERY is a recent solution that utilizes a less common letter.
10. Keep it Simple
Wordle answers are almost never complex words like Ailed, Lotic, or Maile. They are common words that are easy to guess.
11. Use the Previous Word Clues in the Puzzle
If you guessed with TEARS and got a green T and A, it goes without saying that you will use the same T and A for your next guess. However, if you haven’t already, you should start.
It’s not as simple as you might think. If you can’t think of a word that starts with T and ends with A, you could guess with an entirely different word to get some extra letters.
In that puzzle, always rely on the clues from your previous guesswork. You’ll get more potential solutions in less time.
12. For Each Wordle Game Use the Same First Word
Now that you’ve learned not to guess the first word at random and to eliminate or confirm the statistically probable letters, you could perhaps always use the same first word on your first turn.
This makes sense for the reasons stated above, Using a sacrificial word with more common letters every time means you’ll have the best chance of solving the Wordle puzzle every time, and possibly in fewer turns.
13. Simply Cheat
If you can’t come up with a word that fits your remaining letters, green tiles, and yellow tiles, and your flawless run is that important to you, you could simply… cheat!
That’s right, nothing prevents you from using a word-finding website or whatever to evaluate possible words, and thus potential letters to guess with. Nobody will suspect you, you sneak!
However, the fulfillment from any form of gaming comes from beating the game with your own wits, so try it yourself first before stroking your run of successful solutions.
Frequently Asked Questions
When attempting to solve a Wordle puzzle, it is beneficial to keep certain hints and tricks in mind. They can assist you in concentrating on what words to use and how many letters you have to use.
I hope this article motivates you to develop your own techniques, however at the end of the day, it all comes down to your own ability. The more broad your vocabulary set, the more likely you are to get Wordle right.