Wordle Bulletin – Week of July 17 (17-23), 2023 (#758-#764)
Wordle # 764 (July 23, 2023) – NY Times WordleBot score: 3.3 – Triad: ALTER/SONIC/PUDGY
Tactics for today’s Wordle: Since the seed word revealed 2 vowels, changed the 2nd word to SYNCH instead of the 2nd word of the triad (SONIC). After the 2 words, 3 possibilities – HALVE, HAZEL, and WHALE. Used frequency data to select WHALE. It worked.😊
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Wordle # 763 (July 22, 2023) – NY Times WordleBot score: 4.9 – Triad: ALTER/SONIC/PUDGY
Tactics for today’s Wordle: After the first 2 words from the triad, 9 possibilities. Time to deploy the EnotE strategy. Could not come up with a single word to eliminate 8 of the 9 possibilities. Used the 3rd word of the triad as an elimination word. Luckily It worked. 😊
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Wordle # 762 (July 21, 2023) – NY Times WordleBot score: 4.1 – Triad: ALTER/SONIC/PUDGY
Correct target word is BURLY. B U R L Y
Sincere apologies for the error.
Tactics for today’s Wordle: After the first 2 words from the triad, 3 possibilities. Since there were only 3 possibilities, instead of using the EnotE© strategy, used frequency and position mix data to select from the 3 possibilities. Luckily It worked. 😊
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Wordle # 761 (July 20, 2023) – NY Times WordleBot score: 4.3 – Triad: ALTER/SONIC/PUDGY
Tactics for today’s Wordle: After the first 2 words from the triad, 5 possibilities (2 sets of orthographic neighbor words☹). Could not come up with a single elimination word. Used FUDGY (instead of PUDGY which is the 3rd word of the triad). Luckily it did the job. 😊
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Wordle # 760 (July 19, 2023) – NY Times WordleBot score: 3.7 – Triad: ALTER/SONIC/PUDGY
Tactics for today’s Wordle: After the first 2 words from the triad only one possibility! 😊😊😊😊
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Wordle # 759 (July 18, 2023) – NY Times WordleBot score: 4.3 – Triad: ALTER/SONIC/PUDGY
Tactics for today’s Wordle: Between 5 to 9 possibilities after the seed word. Could not come up with a good elimination word. May have taken 2-3 rounds with the EnotE© strategy. For a change decided to go with frequency driven word selection. Lucked out with the guess! 😊
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Wordle # 758 (July 17, 2023) – NY Times WordleBot score: 3.9 – Triad: ALTER/SONIC/PUDGY
Tactics for today’s Wordle: After the first 2 words from the triad, 10+ possibilities. Used the third word of the triad (PUDGY) as the elimination word and it did the job. 😊
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© 2023 Ashok Gupta All rights reserved.
EnotE (Eliminate not Enumerate) is copyrighted by Ashok Gupta
Wordle and WordleBot are trademarks owned by the New York Times.
*The WordleBot score I refer to is as of sometime between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM pacific coast time (USA).
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Useful facts:
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Top 11 consonants in terms of frequency of use (in any of the 5 positions): R T L S N C H P D G M
Rank order of the 6 vowels (including Y) in terms of frequency of use (in any of the 5 positions): E A O I U Y
Typical Wordle word: 2 vowels (counting Y as the sixth vowel), 1 compound (ex KN)/paired consonant (ex NN)
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Strategy
Objective:
Average score of 3.5
% Solve rate -100%
% 5 or 6 – less than 5%
I use an analytical approach, not ad-hoc. My approach is highly unlikely to result in a score of 2. My scores are mostly 3’s and 4’s.
Word Finder Apps
I get help from “word finder apps (WFA). This is a controversial strategy. Some of my colleagues abhor the use of WFAs, but I don’t. To me it is like using a dictionary or a thesaurus while solving crossword puzzles. The most prominent WFA for me is WordHippo. Its URL is shown below:
The Ultimate Word Finder & Unscrambler – Wordle Helper & Cheats (wordhippo.com)
WFA helps me in formulating an elimination word.
Seed word
I have played with several different seed words. For each seed word, I have defined two other words that make a triad. The purpose of a triad is to cover most of the high frequency consonants and the vowels in frequency ranking, beginning with the highest frequency consonants and vowels. So, a seed word has 2 or 3 highest frequency vowels and 3 or 2 highest frequency consonants.
For about a month or so I have been using ALTER as the seed word. The other two words that go with ALTER to make a triad are SONIC and PUDGY.
The top 10 to 12 consonants are as follows:
R T L S N C H P D G M
The frequency-based ranking of the vowels is as follows:
E A O I U Y
The composition of the three words in the triad reflects the hierarchy described above.
These frequency data are based on actual Wordle words from Wordle #1 to Wordle #735.
Wordle Word Characteristics:
Most of the Wordle words have two vowels (counting Y as the 6th vowel) and one compound consonant/paired consonant (example KN or NN).
Second Word
In the case the seed word reveals 2 vowels, I don’t search for additional vowels. In that case my second word is not SONIC. The actual second word depends on what has been revealed by the seed word. If the revelation by the seed word also confirms the position(s) then I prefer to not include that vowel in the second word. However, if we don’t know the exact position(s) of the vowel(s), I may include the vowel(s) in the second word, but not in the same positions as in the seed word in order to reveal their exact position(s).
One such word is CHASE. This word is extremely useful if we know that the vowels A and E exist in the Wordle’s word, but we don’t know their positions. In that case, by using CHASE we are trying to unearth the positions of the two vowels and at the same time trying to see if the three high frequency consonants (C, H and S) are present in the Wordle word.
Third Word
The specific third word is even more dependent upon what we learn from the first two words. I end up using the 3rd word of the triad infrequently. In many cases it is the target word. In other cases, it is an elimination word. I won’t go into any more detail about the third word.
Eliminate not Enumerate (EnotE) strategy
<to be continued>