How to always win at Wordle, Dordle, Quordle and Octordle, and all 5-letter games
An opening strategy that makes sure you will never lose!
The word games have taken root and everyone is playing them — and sharing their stats — who would have thought! We who used to play scrabble were sometimes beleaguered by friends as to how we would find entertainment in words in squares! Josh Wardle’s Wordle changed it all.
For the uninitiated to all the games, while in Wordle you need to figure out one 5 letter word, in Dordle, there are two which you have to find simultaneously, in Quordle four of them and in Octordle a full set of eight of these through the same key strikes that you make.
Oddly, the more the words are, better the chance of working out a few of them quickly.
There are two ways to play any of these games. Either you want to find the word/words in the fastest possible way, that is the least number of steps, or you make clever opening moves as investments so that you can hardly ever lose.
This is about the latter. Investing a few words upfront, and then picking off the correct one through anagram skills.
Naturally everybody tries to eliminate vowels and commonly used words first. Words like ADIEU, AUDIO, AIOLI, CANOE or common words like SLICE, REACH etc. Sometimes people have trouble when they have got 4 letters and it becomes an auction like TEACH, BEACH, REACH etc and there is danger of running out of tries. Double letters have also bothered people, and words like BONNY, POPPY can irritate a lot.
According to Peter Norvig (Distinguished Education fellow at Stanford and former Director of Research, GOOGLE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig), in his article on letter count revisiting Mayzner, the following interesting graph is found on frequency of letters (obviously skewed by the word THE):
Under the circumstances, if one invests 4 words consisting of the most common 20 alphabets first, then the chances of getting it becomes many times more.
The daunting task of constructing words with nil of few repetitions containing the common letters is itself a game and I have been toiling at it for some time now. The result is the set of following 4 words, with NIL repetition and using almost all the common letters. Only exception being using “K” in place of “W”, but then when “W” is required in a word, it becomes quite obvious after these four words.
The four words are:
PLUGS — — DRAFT — — BOINK — — CHYME
That’s it. 4 words targeting all the common letters and actually hitting 20 of them! Try it out, especially on Octordle and Quordle. Then the task of finding the actual words become like shooting sitting ducks! One by one.
The only letters left out are JXVZWQ. They will suggest themselves easily enough when there are obvious blanks.
Almost all 5 letters will come out in green of yellow unless there is a double letter — and therefore more certainty about concluding the game!
The word BOINK has a ribald sub-meaning and the word CHYME is a biological word, but then these could be as accepted as the WORDLE solutions like RUPEE and ROBIN!
Happy shooting!