Until about a week or so ago, I really wasn't concerned how many five-letter words there were in the English language. As it turns out, the number varies widely.
The Free Dictionary lists more than 158,000 words with five letters. The the Official Scrabble Dictionary (which allows some pretty obscure five-letter words), puts the number at about 9,000.
But if some reasonable people come up with some commonly used five-letter words –piano, ouija, knoll, to mention a few –the list will be around 2,500. And at one word a day, that list will last a little shy of seven years.
Five-letter words? One a day? By now you know the topic of today's missive: Wordle, a guess-the-word online game. It's simple and addictive. And the beauty of it is there's only one game a day –the same word for all players. Solve one, wait until midnight for a new game.
It starts with five empty blocks across –one for each letter –stacked six rows deep, one row for each guess. Guess the first word. If it's the right letter in the right place, it will show up green. If it's the right letter, but the wrong location in the word, it will be yellow. If the letter isn't in the word, it will show up in black. A keyboard-like arraignment of 26 letters shows letters guessed and those remaining.
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Wordle is free. There are no pop-up ads. No upgrades to buy. There is no app. The is no download. There is nothing to register. There are no "in-app purchases." It is available only on a website:https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle.
It was developed by Josh Wardle, Brooklyn-based software engineer. His partner liked word games, so he created a guess-the-word game just for her. It being about words, and his last name being Wardle, he made its name a play on his.
It went online around Nov. 1, with 90 players. At the start of this month, there were 300,000 people playing it. The increase continues to be rocket-like.
He believes the game's simplicity is part of its popularity. "I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun," he told The New York Times a few weeks ago. "It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.”
And while he's had some success with games in the past, he attributes the popularity of Wordle to limiting it to one word a day. It prohibits binging, which can lead to burn out.
The game keeps statistics on how many times you've played it, percentage won, and how many times you took one, two, three, four, five or six tries to solve the word. Those results can be shared with friends.
It's not just guessing word after word, of course. One major tip: Start with a five-letter word containing three or more vowels: Piano and audio, for instance. Another tip: Use the keyboard below the layout to keep track of which letters have been used. There's no sense in repeating a letter that's not in the target word.
Wordle, said Wardle, "is something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day. And that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that."
Sometimes, however, it'll take several times more.
Wrong address for writing tablet
A recap of 2021's favorite columns had an incorrect web address for the Blackboard Writing Tablet. Information on the tablet can be found atwww.myboogieboard.com. It is also available for purchase there as well. In addition, it is available from Amazon and possibly big-box stores in the area.
Lonnie Brown can be reached at LedgerDatabase@aol.com.
FAQs
What is the best 5-letter word for Wordle? ›
- DUCAT. ...
- OUIJA. ...
- CAROM. ...
- ERGOT. ...
- CRAIC. ...
- SQUAB. A young unfledged bird, especially a pigeon.
- ENOKI. An edible mushroom with a long, slender stem, a small, yellowish cap, and yellowish gills.
- AZURE. Azure is used to describe things that are bright blue.
Let's initialize the game. As we can see, there are 12972 words of 5 letters in the Wordle dictionary.
What is the new 5 word game? ›Wordle is a free online puzzle game where players try to guess a valid five-letter word in six tries or less. Wordle can be played on a computer or mobile device.
How many 7 letter words are there? ›How many seven letter words are there? Determining the number of words in the English language with seven letters is a difficult task. If you are looking for words in the OCTWL to play in Scrabble, there are close to 35,000 to choose from.
What is the number 1 most used first word in Wordle? ›Sorry Bill Gates, but AUDIO isn't the best word to start with when you're playing Wordle. A pair of MIT researchers recently set out to find the optimal starting word for the popular online puzzle, discovering that the statistically superior first guess is SALET, which is a 15th century helmet.
What is the #1 most used word in Wordle? ›The most common letters used in Wordle are E R A O T, according to an analysis of 221 games from Christopher Ingraham, a former Washington Post reporter. Context: Invented by Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, to amuse his friends and partner, Wordle has become a daily obsession for many ( 🙋).
What are the 3 best words to start with in Wordle? ›If, on the other hand, you're simply trying to win within the allotted six guesses, the top three words to play are “adept,” “clamp” and “plaid.” Using any of these three words will yield an average success rate in winning the game of 98.79 percent, 98.75 percent, and 98.75 percent, respectively, if you're playing the ...
What are the odds of getting Wordle on the first try? ›Since there are 2,315 possible target words in Wordle, the probability that you will guess the target in exactly one try is 1/2315 = 0.000432.
What are the 10 least used letters in Wordle? ›The least common letters in all words are the usual suspects: J, Q, Z, X, and it's unlikely any five-letter Wordle word would contain any of those characters. F, V, and K are also uncommon, but these letters have higher odds of being in one of the five possible Wordle positions.
What is the new word game everyone is playing? ›Wordle is a browser-based word guessing game, there's no app to download, you just visit this website and get cracking. The game gives you six chances to guess a five-letter word and each day the page is updated with a new word.
What letter has the most word? ›
E is everywhere. In an analysis of all 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, OED editors found that the letter E appears in approximately 11% of all words in the common English vocabulary, about 6,000 more words than the runner-up letter, A.
What is the hardest 7 letter word? ›As we are adding up letters, we have now come to: The Hardest Working SEVEN-Letter Word... "SUCCESS" - Achieve it.
What word has all the letters? ›Pangrams are words or sentences containing every letter of the alphabet at least once; the best known English example being A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog .
What 5 letter word is used the most? ›This means the top most commonly used letters in 5-letter words (in terms of total frequency as well as average frequency) were the letters A, E, S, O, R, I, L, T, etc. I decided to focus on the top six letters since the average frequency dropped significantly after the sixth letter.
What are the 3 best words to use in Wordle? ›Based on our analysis, if you're trying to win in as few guesses as possible, the top three words to go with are "slice," "tried" and "crane." Using any of these three words will produce an average number of word attempts of 3.90, 3.92, and 3.92, respectively, if you're using an optimal strategy to play (more on that ...
What are the 2 best words for Wordle? ›If, on the other hand, you're simply trying to win within the allotted six guesses, the top three words to play are “adept,” “clamp” and “plaid.” Using any of these three words will yield an average success rate in winning the game of 98.79 percent, 98.75 percent, and 98.75 percent, respectively, if you're playing the ...
What 5 letter word has the most vowels for Wordle? ›- AUDIO.
- AULOI.
- AUREI.
- LOUIE.
- MIAOU.
- OUIJA.
- OURIE.
- URAEI.