Ditto!! A friend and I both used STARE last week and we got it in two.
I’m not sure why STARE is not the most mathematically optimal seed word. They (Goodle PhD) say it’s ROATE. I like ROATE too but think it’s better to get the S than O.
I like stare because it a “real” word. Also I like getting the S, and I like the E at the end. I chose it on my own (after a few tries with LINER) and then didn’t change after everyone started publishing the optimization articles. Last week was a great week for team STARE!
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I watched a lot of Wheel of Fortune with my dad in his last years. (He had dementia and couldn’t tell you what he had for lunch, but was still a wiz on Wheel and Jeopardy.) RSTLNE. Good point about the E at the end. I always struggle with that.
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‘s’ is the most commonly used letter among all 5 letter words, but not among Wordle solutions since Wordle solutions exclude plurals that end in ‘s’. Instaed the first post of this thread mentions that the 5 most common letters among Wordle solutions are ‘r’, ‘o’, ‘a’, ‘t’, and ‘e’. There are three 5-letter words that use these 5 letters. Among those 3 words, roate is the only one that does not start in a vowel.
That said, the difference in average number of guesses to solve between starting with ROATE and STARE is a negligible ~0.03. Far more influential is your 2nd guess and strategy for the rest of the game than whether you start with ROATE or STARE.
I see that NYT has a new Wordlebot tool than analyzes play at WordleBot: Your Daily, Personalized Wordle Score - The New York Times .
Wordlebot lists the first words with the lowest average number of guesses. I bolded the words that also appear in the top 10 lowest guesses list from the first post. While the specific words for lowest guesses differ, the pattern is similar. All of the fewest guesses words have A as the 3rd letter. The remaining letters are a combination of E (4x), T(4x), C (3x), R (3x), L (2x), N (2x), and S (2x). The words in the first list favor these letters, which are all among the most common Wordle. The main difference is the letter O. The first post lists O as the 4th most common letter among Wordle solutions and has words containing O in some of the lowest average guess first words. Wordlebot does not rank O words as high. This may relate to a different grouping of potential solutions and/or different strategy for later guesses.
Fewest Average Guesses
1 . CRANE – 2.44 guesses, 79 solutions
2. SLATE – 2.44 guesses, 71 solutions
3. CRATE – 2.44 guesses, 73 solutions
4. SLANT – 2.44 guesses, 98 solutions
5. TRACE – 2.44 guesses, 74 solutions
Fewest Remaining Solutions
1 . ROATE – 60.1 solutions, 2.47 guesses
2. IRATE – 63.5 solutions, 2.49 guesses
3. ARISE – 63.5 solutions, 2.50 guesses
4. ORATE-- 63.6 solutions, 2.48 guesses
5. ALTER – 69.8 solutions, 2.48 guesses
My results for the my most recent Wordle are below. I can see why Wordlebot did not like my 2nd guess as much as the 1st and 3rd . None of the 16 solutions it found contain the letter S, so it considers the S in my 2nd guess of COMAS a wasted letter. The 3 most common additional letters among the 16 solutions are L, C and M. The C and M of COMAS are good, but I am missing the most common letter of L.
Wordle 291 3/6
Skill 90/100
Luck 85/100
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Raise has the same letters as arise but I like it better for some reason.
Because more words start with a consonant than a vowel.