wordle

Suggest guesses for Wordle.

Specify what you've tried so far and this script tells you the best words to try next.

Example:

$ ./wordle --help
usage: wordle [-h] [--num-suggestions N] [--all] [--debug] [attempts ...]

Suggest Wordle guesses

positional arguments:
  attempts              For each attempt: X - an uppercase letter is correct
                        and in the right place, x - a lowercase letter is
                        correct but in the wrong place, /x - letter is not in
                        the solution

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --num-suggestions N, -n N
                        Maximum number of suggestions to show (default: 10)
  --all, -a             For each word in the Wordle dictionary, show the best
                        series of guesses
  --debug               Enable debug logging
$
$ ./wordle t/ea/s/e Ao/rt/a
ATTEMPTED:
 1293 tease
  786 aorta

SUGGESTED: (7)
  874 aloft
  839 allot
  780 atoll
  778 afoot
  736 about
  708 adopt
  599 abbot
$

The number in the first column is the "score" for that word. A higher number means the word is more likely to be right.

A word's score is calculated based on how often each letter appears in each of the five positions throughout the dictionary. For example, for the word "slate":

There are 366 words with 's' in the 1st position
201 with 'l' in the 2nd position
307 with 'a' in 3rd
139 with 't' in 4th
424 with 'e' in 5th

So "slate" gets a score of 1437 = 366 + 201 + 307 + 139 + 424.

The ten best words to start with:

$ ./wordle | head
SUGGESTED: (2315)
 1437 slate
 1411 sauce
 1409 slice
 1403 shale
 1398 saute
 1393 share
 1392 sooty
 1382 shine
 1381 suite
 1378 crane
$

With the --all option, the script analyzes the whole dictionary.

We can see the three hardest words:

$ ./wordle --all | sort -r | head -3
8 hound = slate crony bound pound found mound wound hound
8 hatch = slate taint carat batch patch match watch hatch
8 graze = slate crane brake frame grade grape grave graze
$

Each of these words (hound, hatch and graze) would take 8 guesses if you guessed the word most likely to match each time. But of course you only get 6 guesses.

There are 19 words that take 7 guesses.

$ ./wordle --all | grep -c ^7
19
$

With this scoring algorithm, we can expect 3.8 guesses on average.

$ wordle --all | awk '{s+=$1} END{print s/NR}'
3.82333
$

MichaelCook/wordle

wordle