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Happy 1,000th birthday,Wordle!
You might wonder why that’s helpful, but trust me it really, really is.
That’s because Wordle is as much a game about probability as it is about words.
That’s because its first puzzle was #0, rather #1.
Well, as a simple example consider your start word.
I soon realized that there was a huge amount of insight to be gleaned from the data.
Simply tap the column to organize it.
The table below details how likely each letter is to appear in a Wordle answer.
Why the need for two figures?
As you’d imagine, some letters are far more likely to appear than others.
Seriously, put an E in your opener right away.
At the bottom, meanwhile, four letters stand out: J, X, Q and Z.
This quartet only appear 133 in total, which is fewer than the number for any other individual letter.
Yes, really there are more Vs than there are Js, Xs, Qs and Zs combined.
Conclusion: don’t play one of them unless you have to.
I’ve added another couple of columns here, though: ‘Vs games’ and ‘Vs appearances’.
Really, though, there’s not a lot in it.
The most common letters overall have been the most common letters so far, exactly as you’d expect.
S, for instance, starts 365 of Wordle’s original 2,309 solutions, but ends only 36.
Y is almost the exact opposite, starting a mere six answers, but ending 364.
Pro tip: I find column three to be arguably the most useful of all.
This is a deep rabbit hole to venture down, because there are so many possible combos.
For the final two, meanwhile, there are 202.
What about the ending combinations?
Well, there’s no contest here it’s the dreaded ER pairing.
Along with those aforementioned ER words, they make everything more difficult than it would otherwise be.
And there are a surprisingly large number of them in Wordle.
That one, which has yet to appear, contains one letter three times and the other one twice.
I suspect that will be a fun one… Well, most are fairly obvious.
As a bonus, I’ve included a column showing how many repeats are still remaining for each letter.
You have been warned.
Opinion is split as to which are most important.
I take a very different approach.
Still, there’s no doubting that vowels play an oversized part in the game.
As the table below demonstrates, vowels and consonants are each more likely to appear in specific locations.
Because while Wordle may be a social game, your Wordle experience is yours alone.
