Quick analysis of Wordle’s dictionary to find out what are good words to start with and quickly hit as many target word characters as possible.
There are 12974 words in the dictionary. This table shows how many words contain each letter:
| char | n_words |
|---|---|
| S | 5936 |
| E | 5705 |
| A | 5332 |
| O | 3912 |
| R | 3911 |
| I | 3589 |
| L | 3114 |
| T | 3033 |
| N | 2789 |
| U | 2437 |
| D | 2298 |
| Y | 2031 |
| C | 1920 |
| P | 1885 |
| M | 1868 |
| H | 1708 |
| G | 1543 |
| B | 1519 |
| K | 1445 |
| W | 1028 |
| F | 990 |
| V | 674 |
| Z | 391 |
| J | 289 |
| X | 287 |
| Q | 112 |
Word count by character
Characters S, E, A, O, R are the most frequent ones. They are all contained by each one of these words:
AEROS, AROSE, SOARE
With any of the above words as the first guess, there is a 96% chance that at least a single character from the day’s word will be hit, 69% chance for unveiling two characters, and 24% chance for hitting as many as three.
Characters I, L, T, N, U come as the next group in terms of frequency. It’s possible to form a 5-character word from all of them too:
UNLIT, UNTIL
At this point two characters are known in 96% of cases. There is a 75% chance that at least three letters have been hit and 31% likelihood of having unveiled four letters.
Still stuck after the first two blind guesses? This is the next group of characters based on frequency: D, Y, C, P, M
It’s not possible to form a word from just these characters. In fact, it’s not possible to create a word from any five of the so far unused characters. So let’s find words that introduce four new letters:
CAMPY, DAMPY, DUMPY
After these three guesses, we know at least three characters of the day’s word in 92% of games. That’s not bad, is it?