Millions of people play Wordle every day, and share, discuss and debate how they tried to win.
For the first time, we’ve analyzed how players performed in half a billion of those Wordle games over the past year and compared their results with the strategies that our WordleBot recommends.
Here are seven things we learned:
1. Of the top 30 starting words, ADIEU is the most popular but least efficient.
Many, many words have been written about the best opening word for Wordle. Answering this question was, in fact, one of the motivations behind WordleBot’s development. In its robot brain, a handful of words — SLATE, CRANE, TRACE — are given the bot’s seal of approval as leading to the solution in the fewest guesses on average.
But for human Wordle players, the most popular opening word by some margin is ADIEU, with AUDIO, another four-vowel word, not far behind.
The strategy seems to make sense: Figure out the vowels, and the other letters will fall into place. The bot has never favored starting this way, but it’s possible that the best strategy for a computer is not the best strategy for a human.
Our new analysis, though, shows that starting with ADIEU or AUDIO does actually put human players at a disadvantage. How much of one?