This is the latest pandemic phenomenon called Wordle a freeonline gamethat gives users a new word puzzle each day.
In Wordle, players have six tries to guess a target five-letter word.
Its sort of like the board gameMastermindbut with a key difference.
In Mastermind, all six colors were equally likely to appear in the target.
How to find the best first guess?
What we need to know is: how common are each of the 26 letters in five-letter English words.
And not just in any five-letter words, those that have a chance of showing up as targets.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
I found a recentstudythat looked at over 60,000 English words and how well-known they were.
Then I counted the number of times each letter appeared at least once in a word.
Letter frequencies
The most common letter was e, appearing in 46% of words.
This is a well-known pattern that applies to theEnglish language in general.
For example, tone is pronounced differently than ton.
Out of these six letters, one word immediately arose as the best option!
Want an especially bad first guess?
Try whump (a dull thudding sound).
That is just about the worst by this metric.
The most frequent letters, by position, in common five-letter words.
But lets not stop there.
One final thing to note.
Also, that list might change and I wanted to find a more general answer.
So there you have it.
Now what you do with guesses two through six is up to you.
