It’s the game that has captured the minds of the nation and just been sold to The New York Times for an undisclosed seven figure sum, the alphabet based deduction game Wordle is the very latest trend on social media. Here’s eight tips on how you can become a Wordle winner.
1. Understanding the rules
Although it can be tempting to skip ahead of the rules that pop up when you first load the website, they are important. A new wordle only generates once every 24 hours so don’t expect a different word to be selected after you guess correctly.
There are three important colours in the game, green, grey and yellow.
A letter with a green background indicates that the letter is in the word and in the correct column, whilst a letter which has a yellow background indicates that the letter is in the wrong column but is located somewhere else in the word. Grey is the colour which you want to avoid as this indicates that the letter is not contained within the word. However you can still use letters which are incorrect or have a grey background to build a new word and deduce the correct letters.
Don’t forget to hit the enter key to submit your guess or it will not count.
2. Use vowels first
When you gain access to the latest Wordle, try and include as many vowels as you can in your first five letter word. This should help later on in the game because you will know roughly how many vowels are in the five letter word and perhaps even their position in the word which will narrow down possible letter combinations at an earlier stage.
3. Recycle the same word every single time you play
When deciding what word you should type in as your guess, it can be tempting to believe that you should try and vary your approach every single time you play Wordle. However, use the same five letter word as your starting point of every single game, regardless of the outcome the last time that you played. For example “about” is a 5 letter word with three vowels which if used repeatedly may help you guess some of the more challenging letter sequences because you always have the same baseline to start from.
4. Forget about the time
Currently, there is no time limit when inputting your guesses in Wordle. You should use this to your advantage and instead focus on patterns that are developing from your previous guesses and gathering your thoughts.
If you are advancing through your attempts and you don’t feel that you are making progress you can always come back to it at a later point or read something else for inspiration about how you can utilise the letters which you have left.
5. Use phonetics to improve your placement of letters
The lack of a timer also provides the opportunity to verbalise different letter combinations using phonetics. When using phonetics it becomes easier to verify and discard some of the other letters you will have remaining as you advance through your attempts to solve the Wordle.
6. Remember the American focus
Wordle uses American English, which is important because we have all been unfortunate enough to write something online, only for spellcheck to change our spelling to another variation of English. This recently gained attention on social media because some players claimed they wouldn’t have been able to correctly guess the word as it was spelt with only five letters in American English while the British spelling uses six letters.
7. Duplicate letters
Wordle’s colour system, as previously discussed in this article is designed to make you aware if a letter is in the correct place. However, even if a letter is marked as green there is still a possibility that the letter will be duplicated later in the word. Examples of this include “Sours” or “Kicks” and may cost you the game.
8. Make sure you are using the correct game
There are similar applications on the Apps store, even with the same name. However these applications are not officially the same as the website version which can be found here. So, if you feel like you keep getting the wrong answers even after hints from friends, check that you are all playing the same version.
Hopefully after reading these tips and tricks, you now feel better equipped to win at wordle and become a Wordle winner.
Feature image credit: Wordle
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