Starting words, Wordle

According to the NYT, few players use a consistent starting word when playing Wordle. Of the 28% of players (with more than 10 games played) who have used the same starting word 90% of the time, the words are: ADIEU, AUDIO, STARE, RAISE, and ARISE.

Full disclosure: I’m pretty sure I’m in this sample group and RAISE is my starting word.

Many months ago at the outset of the Wordle craze, long before the NYT bought it, I wrote a Wordle solver — a computer program that will play Wordle against itself and keep lots of fun statistics about those games.

To folks in reading this in the far future: This is the sort of activity the pandemic forced us into.

I’ll save the details of how the Wordle solver works for another post (short version: it does same math as it would if it were solving Mastermind), but I was curious how these words would perform against each other. So I took my solver, looked up a few other sources for “best starting words” and simulated 100,000 games with each of them.

Would my RAISE come out on top?

	Word	Win Percentage	Average Number of Rounds	± Rounds
1	slant	86.65%	4.9680	1.51
2	trace	85.37%	5.0417	1.57
3	crate	85.36%	5.0340	1.57
4	crane	84.93%	5.0744	1.60
5	piano	84.65%	5.1039	1.55
6	slate	84.02%	5.0526	1.62
7	audio	83.74%	5.1774	1.56
8	stare	82.95%	5.1180	1.66
9	snare	82.62%	5.1358	1.67
10	roate	82.59%	5.1500	1.69
11	tears	82.43%	5.1214	1.71
12	yuppy	82.12%	5.4342	1.35
13	adieu	81.84%	5.2540	1.64
14	soare	81.21%	5.2077	1.71
15	raise	80.01%	5.2551	1.79
16	quest	79.98%	5.3882	1.67
17	arise	79.72%	5.2750	1.81

No. No it didn’t. It came in a very (very) sad 15th place out of 17.

So I guess I need to change my starting word to SLANT? With a 6% better win rate, it seems silly not to.

To define what’s going on in that table a little better — “Win Percentage” is the number of times the solver was able to guess the right word by the 6th guess (inclusive), and “Average Number of Rounds” is the average number of rounds it took to solve the puzzle (I let the program keep solving past 6 rounds just so that it doesn’t get discouraged).

Which all adds up to “RAISE” is a bad choice for a starting word. Old habits die hard though, so despite it being suboptimal I know I’m going to have a hard time changing.

I should note, all of these games are played on “hard mode” — which is to say every guess must use all of the information from all of the previous guesses. If the solver knows a word has an “E” in it, it won’t guess “COUNT” for example.

Maybe the next experiment with the solver should be removing the hard mode restriction? What happens if, instead of just specifying the first guess, the first two guesses are scripted to be words that contain different letters from one another? For example, like “RAISE” as a first guess and “COUNT” for the next guess. Would that increase the win percentage? Would the number of rounds to solve the puzzle go up because it’s more often than not throwing away one extra guess?

You've been challenged to a duel

I’m getting a kick out of these rules for dueling as published in 1847. Despite the fact I have no intention of dueling anyone, it never hurts to know the rules. To start with:

No gentleman may notice the insulting language of an inferior.

And what if your ladyfriend is disparaged? Well it’s important to know there are no takebacks. Which seems a bit strict.

For direct insult to a lady, no apology can be received. But as this code is intended for the use of gentlemen, and as no individual of that caste is capable of insulting a lady, the despicable hounds so transgressing are hereby surrendered to the ear-slitting clemency of the lady’s friends.

Even if you loathe your dueling partner, be sure to say “hi” on the field. Don’t worry, you won’t be required to use actual words.

After taking your place, you will salute your antagonist with a distant but not discourteous inclination of the head.

Should you win the duel, please know that despite your elation at not having a new hole in your body, the moment is not right for gloating.

After the duel, apply no recriminating or disparaging language toward your late antagonist…

From the lengthily titled “The code of honor or, The thirty-nine articles; with an appendix, showing the whole manner in which the duel is to be conducted; with amusing anecdotes, illustrative of duelling; to which is prefixed a dissertation on the origin and progress of the duello, by a Southron”.