Wordle Bulletin # 491 (October 23, 2022)

By Ashok Gupta
on Oct 24, 2022
in Daily Bulletins, Eliminate-Not-Enumerate, Seed word, Strategy

My strategy is built to ensure I solve 95% of the puzzles in 4 guesses or less.
It is not built to always shoot for the lowest score possible.

Target Word: MUMMY
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one compound consonant (2 letters or 3 letters; seen with >50% frequency)
Today’s Wordle Word Construct: Today’s Wordle is an outlier – three occurrences of one letter (M). None of the three letters (MUY) appears in top 10 letters frequency wise
# Of Guesses: 5.8 WordleBot average per Marc McLaren*; 5 for WordleGuru

Seed Word: SOARE
Seed Word Revelations: None! But all is not lost. We know that the target word doesn’t have S, O, A, R and E. That’s a huge learning.
# Of Possible Solutions after the Seed Word: Too many

Second Word: UNITY; There has to be at least one vowel in the target word. I needed to search for this vowel. The standard go to word for this is UNITY (after SOARE as the seed word).
Revelations from the 2^nd word: two vowels. “Y” in the 5^th spot; “U” in either 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th spot.
# Of Possible Solutions after the Second Word: 35. I had to start employing my EnotE strategy. I could not think of a word that would eliminate 34 of the 35. So, I had to look for a second-best alternative. The elimination word I came up with is CLUMP.

Third Word: CLUMP; it eliminated 31 of 35; not bad but left me with a big headache. The four words left to deal with are orthographic neighbors – GUMMY, YUMMY, DUMMY, and MUMMY. I had to apply the EnotE second time. The second elimination word was easy to arrive at. I chose MIDGE.

Fourth Word: MIDGE; It eliminated 3 of the four orthographic neighbor words and left me with the solution – MUMMY.

EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: This Wordle is a good example of the power of the EnotE strategy, even though I had to apply it twice.

Final thoughts: This is one of the most difficult Wordles I remember doing. Maybe there are even more difficult, but I don’t remember. I wasn’t sure how fiendish WordleGod is likely to be today. The omen was not good.
WordleGod was up to his old tricks with 1 set of 4 orthographic neighbor words among the 4 possible answers. ☹
© 2022 Ashok Gupta All rights reserved.
Wordle and WordleBot are trademarks owned by the New York Times.

*The WordleBot score I refer to comes from Tom’s Guide by Marc McLaren. Marc writes his post at around 7 AM U.K. time.
https: //www.tomsguide.com/news/what-is-todays-wordle-answer#section-previous-wordle-answers