Wordle Holiday

The New York Times recently ran a story about its popular word game, Wordle. The article offers little of interest, except to advise those who play the game to choose a starting word with a healthy mix of vowels and consonants.   Duh! Statistical analysis suggests that the most popular starting word, "adieu," isn't that great. Words like "slate," "crane," and "trace" are likely to lead more quickly to the correct solution.

Part of the appeal of Wordle, as far as I'm concerned, is that you can only play it once a day, there is only one solution, and the meaning of the words plays no part in the solution. Therefore, a good deal of whimsy can be involved in choosing an opening word. Every morning, around 5:30 or 6:00, I find myself lying in bed thinking of words such as WORSE, ASCOT, TRAIL, and CHORD, though by the time I make the coffee, do my morning stretching exercises, and get to the computer, the word I've chosen is long gone, and I have to start all over again.

I have a strip of paper here beside me listing the twelve most common letters, though on some occasions I start out with a word that includes an unlikely consonant such as W or P, just to see if I get lucky. I also tend to avoid using S and T, because I'd rather have those letters in reserve to slip in to the blank spots between the letters I happen to get right on my first guess.

If I do happen to get a few letters right on my first guess, there is a strong temptation to keep them in place and try to nail the correct  word on the next guess. That's not always the best strategy.  Better, perhaps, to select five new letters. You won't get the word right, but you'll learn more, and be in a better position to get the correct word on your third try.

The low point of my Wordle career came on the day when, after two guesses, I had correctly guessed four of the five letters and was faced with _INGE. Great! I hastily supplied what seemed to me to be the obvious missing letter. TINGE. Wrong!

Oh, how could I have missed it? The word must be HINGE. Wrong again!

By this time quite a few letters had been eliminated, and there seemed to be nothing left but BINGE. Bingo!

Well, getting a five isn't the end of the world. But clearly there was nothing at work here except bad luck. It happens, though some Wordle experts (such as the bot) would have come up with a word on the third guess that eliminated  all but one of the letters H, T, and B. Even now, I can't think of what that word might be. THROB?

The bot, in case you aren't familiar with the game, is a computer-generated feature that analyses your choices to determine the degree to which luck and skill figures in your success and how your performance measures up to the millions of other people who are playing the game. The bot also plays each game, rifling through every possible guess to figure out which one is best, so you can also see how you stack up against it.

The bot isn't infallible, however. On one day's event it ranked my skill level as lower than average, and also my luck level, when compared against the norm. Yet my score that morning was half a point better than the average. How could that be? 

So far I've played Wordle 621 times—it only takes ten minutes—and the statistics suggest I'm getting a little better at it. In fact, during the last two-week period, my score has been, on average, not only significantly better than the average NYT reader, but better than the bot. (see above)

I'm sure my luck won't hold out for long. And anyway, who cares?

Yet perhaps there is some deep meaning hidden within the progression of words: Tinge, Hinge, Binge.