Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #441 (September 3, 2022)
Caveat: I am not to be confused with WordleGuru. I am under my guru’s tutelage.
I am an average player. My average “#of guesses required to solve a puzzle” score is pretty similar to that of New York Times’ WordleBot.
WordleGuru Grid
Wordle #441; September 3, 2022
Overall Summary
This was a tough one. But I lucked out. As we know Wordle is a game of luck and skill. After my second guess I had more than 30 possible answers. Elimination words were also many. Luckily for me the elimination word I chose proved to have “superpower”, as it eliminated all but one – the target word! Lady luck was smiling on me today. Today’s WordleBot score is 4.8 confirming that this puzzle is a tough one.
1st and 2nd Guesses
The first guess was from a new triad ARISE/CLOUD/NYMPH. The initiation was not good – ARISE failed to identify even one letter. Since ARISE indicated the absence of the vowels A, E and I, I wanted to test for the remaining three vowels including Y using one word. Neither CLOUD not NYMPH would have met that requirement. I chose POUTY, a word with the three missing vowels in ARISE. Since P and T are high frequency letters, POUTY would serve a dual purpose.
POUTY confirmed Y in the 5th spot and U in spots of 1,2 or 4. At this point, I had more than 30 possible words. The following image lists these words.
I spent the next 5 to 10 minutes trying to figure out a good elimination word. I considered whole bunch of them with one vowel and four consonants. I consulted the frequency table to help me with the decision. Needless to say, it is not possible to cover all the consonants that we don’t know about in the 4 posts available in a five-letter word. I needed to find the “right one”! Some of the elimination words I considered are LUNCH, LYNCH, FLOCK, CLUNG, CLUNK, FLANK, FLUNG, etc. Finally, I settled on FLUNG. With trepidation I entered it. Lo and behold, it eliminated all but one possibilities, leaving me with one possible solution, the target word. Wordle is a game of luck and skill!
Today’s Wordle is a great example of the power of the right elimination word. It required 5 to 10 minutes of thinking to come up with one. You have to have an idea of the possible solutions before you can come up with the right elimination word. Having frequency data clearly helps in the decision. I was pretty sure that the letter U is in the second spot and the spots three and four either had a compound consonant (such as CH, PH, CK) or a duplicated consonant (such as LL). This information comes from analyzing the Wordle words.
Final Words
The WordleGod was being kind to me today.
© 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