A notable exception is George Perec’s novel A Void, which was purposefully written without the letter “e”. This is a well-known pattern that applies to the English language in general. The most common letter was “e”, appearing in 46% of words. Then I counted the number of times each letter appeared at least once in a word. I 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). This sort of statistic is interesting for language researchers like me because it captures something about how easily a word can be processed: on average, more commonly known words are read faster. I found a recent study that looked at over 60,000 English words and how well-known they were. 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. And not just in any five-letter words, those that have a chance of showing up as targets. What we need to know is: how common are each of the 26 letters in five-letter English words. This leads to a question that I’ve seen people discussing at length online: what is the best first word to guess?įor now, let’s define the “best first guess” as the one that is most likely to share the most letters with the target word. 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. In Mastermind, all six colours were equally likely to appear in the target. It’s sort of like the boardgame Mastermind but with a key difference. 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). In Wordle, players have six tries to guess a target five-letter word. You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here. As of January 10, the game has 2.7 million players. It was created by Josh Wardle for his crossword-loving partner. This is the latest pandemic phenomenon called Wordle – a free online game that gives users a new word puzzle each day. If you’ve been on any social media platform in the past two weeks, you’ve probably seen a grid of green, yellow and black squares.
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