Wordle letter stats and my new strategy

Like everyone else in the world today, I’ve been playing Wordle lately. I’m notoriously horrible at spelling, but it’s been fun since it’s basically a logic game. As with any logic game, Math can be helpful so I grabbed every valid word from the world JavaScript and ran some stats on it. I found that letters are used as follows

Letter	Count	Repeats (in word)	1st Letter	2nd Letter	3rd Letter	4th Letter	5th Letter
a	5330	646	737	2263	1236	1074	680
b	1519	103	909	81	335	243	59
c	1920	106	922	176	392	411	127
d	2298	149	685	84	390	471	823
e	5705	918	303	1628	882	2327	1522
f	990	118	598	24	178	233	82
g	1543	99	638	76	364	423	143
h	1708	52	489	546	120	235	370
i	3589	169	165	1383	1051	880	280
j	289	2	202	11	46	29	3
k	1444	61	376	95	272	503	259
l	3114	250	577	699	848	771	476
m	1868	102	693	188	511	402	182
n	2787	159	325	345	964	788	530
o	3911	525	262	2096	993	698	389
p	1885	127	859	231	364	418	147
q	111	1	78	15	13	2	4
r	3909	246	628	940	1198	719	673
s	5936	717	1565	93	533	516	3958
t	3033	254	815	239	616	898	727
u	2436	73	189	1187	667	401	67
v	674	20	242	52	240	156	4
w	1028	11	413	163	271	128	64
x	287	1	16	57	133	12	70
y	2031	43	181	271	213	108	1301
z	391	42	105	29	142	126	32

This gives me some basic info, but I thought it would also be good to what actual words include letters the most common, so here are the 10 words with no repeating letters that are most common:

cares
bares
pares
tares
cores
bores
mares
pores
canes
dares

Based on this, I thought I should come up with a strategy to always use cares as my first word. I then re-raran the stats and looking at words that didn’t include those five litters AND didn’t include doubles, decided my second word would be litho

The Cares/Litho Strategy

If you use Cares as your first word and litho.as the second, you are going to have at least one match with all but 65 words. I’ll also get perfect matches in a few thousand words (the most being in the fifth position)

c/l	a/i	r/t	e/h	s/o
1172	3646	1814	2562	4347

I put my strategy to the test today with Wordle 206.

Wordle 206 4/6

⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I got 1 letter the first time and 1 the second but no positions. After finishing, I ran the numbers and see there are 520 words that include an r, but not as the 3 letter and include an i but not as the second. My guess of ruins was designed to figure ou the positions of both of those words while also trying the unused letters of n and u. Running some numbers, briny would have been better to use here since I already knew the s wasn’t going get me a winner. I was able to guess drink since ruins gave me the position for the i and the n and the r was well placed.

Let’s see if my cares/litho strategy works going forward!

Today is my friend Matt’s birthday. He asked people to celebrate by writing, so I wrote this post. In the old school spirit of Webrings, here are 3 more friends who published something recently.

Jeremy Felt – How To Blog Every Week

Patrick Martin – Don’t Judge A District By It’s Shape

Mika Epstein – Best (US) Network of 2021