Back in 2022, in a bid to outwit my mother in our daily Wordle battles, I wrote some C# code to explore optimal starting guesses. You can read about that experiment here. Fast forward two years, and my Wordle addiction is alive and well. The daily challenge remains as compelling as ever, but it’s the family WhatsApp group – where scores are shared, victories boasted, and failures commiserated – that adds an extra layer of fun. ...
Like (it would seem) most of the rest of humanity, the start of my 2022 has been immeasurably enhanced by starting each day playing Josh Wardle’s charming word game Wordle. Which got me wondering – what are the best starter words to play in the opening lines at Wordle? I have been habitually using “ADIEU” as my starter word, reasoning that it contains a large number of vowels. But is D a particularly common consonant? And should I be trying to get O in there rather than the less frequently used U? I decided to do some computer-aided analysis to find the answer. ...