David Sidhu and John Dixon
If you’ve been on any social media platform recently, you’ve probably seen a grid of green, yellow and black squares.
This is the latest pandemic phenomenon called Wordle ‒ a free online game that gives users a new word puzzle each day. It was created by Josh Wardle for his crossword-loving partner. It has about three million players.
In Wordle, players have six tries to guess a target five-letter word. Every time they make a guess, they are told which letters in their guess are in the word and in the correct position (green), and which letters are in it but in a different position (yellow).
It’s sort of like the boardgame Mastermind but with a key difference. In Mastermind, all six colours were equally likely to appear in the target. In Wordle, because guesses and targets all have to be real words, some letters are more likely to appear, making some guesses better than others.
This leads to a question people have been discussing at length online: what is the best first word to guess?
For now, let’s define the “best first guess” as the one that is most likely to share the most letters with the target word. What we need to know is: how common are each of the 26 letters in five-letter English words. And not just in any five-letter words, those that have a chance of showing up as targets.
Obscure words like “nisus” (a mental or physical effort to attain an end) or “winze” (a connection between different levels of a mine) need not apply.
A recent study that looked at more than 60 000 English words and how well-known they were. This sort of statistic is interesting for language researchers because it captures something about how easily a word can be processed: on average, more commonly known words are read faster.
Sidhu writes that he “took all five-letter words that were known by at least 50% of those studied (if you knew “nisus” or “winze” ‒ I certainly didn’t ‒ you share that feat with only 7% of the sample). Then I counted the number of times each letter appeared at least once in a word“.
The most common letter was “e”, appearing in 46% of words. This is a well-known pattern that applies to the English language in general. A notable exception is George Perec’s novel A Void, which was purposefully written without the letter “e”. This pattern was even used by Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Dancing Men to decode a cipher made up of dancing stick figures by reasoning that the most common symbol would be “e”.
One reason “e” is so common was the advent of the silent “e” at the end of words in the 16th century, used to signal something about the preceding sounds. For example, “tone” is pronounced differently than “ton”.
The next most common letters were: “a” (39%), “r” (34%), “o” (29%), and “i” and “s” tied for fifth (28%). Out of the six letters, one word immediately “arose” as the best option! Want an especially bad first guess? Try “whump” (a dull thudding sound). That is just about the worst by this metric.
But while “arose” is most likely to get you letters in the target, they may not be in the correct positions.
If we want a word that is most likely to get letters in their correct positions, the best option is “samey” (monotonous, repetitive, unvaried). But let’s not stop there. If we put these approaches together into one final score, we get a word that looks eyrie-ly familiar: “soare” (a young hawk) – “arose” but in a more strategic order.
“Soare” seems to be the best. But what you do with guesses two through six is up to you.
Several computer experts have managed to hack Wordle, meaning they’ve been able to access the complete catalogue of upcoming solutions embedded in the game’s code.
This probably doesn’t sound like good news, particularly if you’re a Wordle fanatic and don’t want your fun spoilt. But it shouldn’t really matter.
How has Wordle become such a viral hit? What makes it so addictive? And why is the fact that it’s been hacked unlikely to detract from our enjoyment of the game?
Many games are offered for free, with revenue coming from advertising and in-game purchases. Waning player interest results in diminishing revenue, so there’s significant focus on techniques to increase time spent playing and keep players coming back.
The techniques typically target the brain’s reward centres, flooding the amygdala and hippocampus with dopamine, which generates feelings of happiness and a desire to keep playing. By hijacking primal tendencies such as competitiveness, excitement (or stress) and achievement, game and app developers can stimulate a craving for more.
Dixon writes that cheating on Wordle doesn’t carry much appeal.
Cheating inherently stimulates the brain’s reward centres less than using skill. Cheaters lose out on achievement and excitement rewards for the “cultural capital” gained through competitiveness. But the culture around Wordle seems to be more of decency and fun for the sake of having fun.
The game is providing pleasure to a huge number of daily players. The opportunity to share that pleasure and engage in a collective experience is, especially at a time when people are in need of some optimism, a great thing. - The Conversation
- David Sidhu is a Research Fellow at University College London in Psychology and Language Sciences. Dixon is a computer science lecturer at the University of Hull.
The Independent on Saturday