It’s “punishment” because the vowel-dump openers (ADIEU, AUDIO, OUIJA, etc.) are a cheat-code that only works if the answer actually has A/E/I/O/U.
Almost every Wordle does. A handful don’t — they only use Y (MYRRH, NYMPH, GLYPH, TRYST…). Those first two guesses come back all gray, you’ve spent half your lives learning almost nothing, and you’re now staring at a keyboard of unused consonants.
People who hate that optimized style treat the rare no-vowel day as the puzzle slapping the spreadsheet players. That’s the joke.
Yeah, if you do NYMPH next, you get to know if there’s an H, M or a P in it, that should eliminate basically the rest of the list if they’re absent, and TRYST is right there.
What's more, because the R is green you know where it goes. If it's not in second position then you've potentially got the answer in 3. (There's quite a few words with no vowels but with the R in second place)
3blue1brown uses exactly that principle in their video “Solving wordle using information theory”, where he argues that the best thing to guess is not the most-likely word, but the word which is expected to reduce the uncertainty of the solution the most.
I just don’t understand that thinking. If the goal is to solve the puzzle, why not optimize for winning? Should I just throw a random 5 letter word out as my opener each time? JAZZY isn’t a great start.
The thinking goes along the lines of “optimizing isn’t fun, so anyone optimizing is just playing to win, and is a tryhard instead of just having a good time.”
And clearly, that makes it the ‘wrong’ way to play.
Personally, I don’t like optimizing, but I do enjoy beating the average score with a sub-optimal play style, so I appreciate those who do optimize.
The individuals' answer is interesting, but unsatisfying. The "optimal" way to play requires the player know a list of options exists and using first picks based on said list. The vast majority of players might subconsciously know there is a list of options. They have absolutely no way of knowing what is on said list.
I doubt the list has changed much since the early days, when it was accessible through the page's source code. I suspect that version is still available in various places online.
I forget what it's called but there is (or at least once was) a version where you have to follow "hard mode" rules and go the longest you possibly can without getting the word.
I wrote a program to find the guess that would give the least information each turn.
If the goal is to solve the puzzle, why not optimize for winning?
Not that I have anything against people who play Wordle differently than me, but it's because the optimized beginning words essentially remove the whole puzzle. Unless they're specifically using a word to circumvent optimized words, almost anyone can complete the Wordle using the same three letter finding words to start out with. If you're the type to brag about getting the Wordle, and you don't use letter scouting words, it's probably annoying to encounter people who completed the puzzle using what you consider a "cheat code."
Of course, this stems mostly from people feeling like completing the Wordle at all is something to brag about.
Depends on your version of fun. Me and my wife always play the wordle together every night. I’m an optimizer and love getting it in 2 or 3, but my wife goes off of vibes and often chooses a word that relates to something that happened in our day. My inclination is to optimize everything, and that may be more satisfying when it works, but honestly her way is actually funner overall. I also do think her way makes you a better player as we more unique situations and have to use more unique words. We also play on hard mode, which is when you have to use your yellow (in a new spot) or green letters instead of using 5 new letters.
We’re not trying to be competitive, though. Like if you really want to be #1 wordler, or just love using every ounce of strategy to get a few percentage points, by all means go for it and I mean that genuinely.
There are many articles on this with slightly different methods and ideas, but the basic concept was that the words in the Wordle solution list and accepted guess list used to be known, so you could pretty much brute force solve it. A good first guess should, on average, yield as few remaining solutions as possible.
Words like ADIEU are good but not top-tier. There are some common words like RAISE, SLATE, CRANE that are better, and some obscure words like ROATE. Again, it depends on who you ask and when, since the solution list is now secret, but in general, eliminating some common consonants seems more powerful than four vowels. The U in ADIEU is not particularly valuable since almost no words end in U.
Its actually statistically one of the worst opening strategies, so I read this tweet as someone mad because they thing vowel-dumping is stupid and low-skill lmao
Reminds me of the AI learning to play video games research. It was graded on how long in real time it lasted before defeat, so the model learned to press Pause.
Key consonants with key vowels like t, n, s, r with e, a, i are best. Someone mathematically figured out Trace is the best word to start and the official wordle bot starts with Slate
It's a bad strategy imo. Vowels have the highest hit ratio and that's why people do this, but they don't help identify words as much as knowing key consonants. Planning first words around the most popular consonants i find to work much better.
Key consonants is why I usually start with Chase or something similar - two different vowels and common consonants help a lot in the first couple rounds
Lol, that's funny to me because I invented "stale" on my own, but I usually prefer "rates" because I like "r" more, and I like to check the second-last for "e" (for 'ed and 'er endings mostly, but it's a common spot) and the last for "s" for plurals. But I try for every word after the first usually (which I also try technically), I also just make sure to cover my bases.
If I have something like "ba_ed" and barely have other letters, I'll have to attempt a catch word (like stork) to check a bunch of letters together.
Statistically maybe. I'm pretty sure s, t, a, and e are top 10 most frequent letters in the english language. Maybe it slices even better when restricting for only 5 letters
That's a nice one. If I were still playing I might have to steal this (I switched from audio to rates for this reason, which kept the a and e, but gave me most of the wheel of fortune letters (RSTLNE)
I’ve always thought it was a terrible strategy. It’s much easier to guess the vowels when you know the consonants than it is to guess the consonants when you know the vowels.
Heh, I'm old enough that "video game" means you need a digital device to play it. Doesn't matter what the style, genre or type of game is. It's a video game if it requires a screen.
I want to see the win rate of the guy who refuses to use vowels in his opener on sheer principle that he's so much better than the people who use the vowel search strat.
Funnily enough, from a mathematical pov, having no vowels is one of the answers with the most information possible. There are very few legal words with only a 'Y'. So knowing within 2 guesses that it's one of the few is enormously informative.
If you're interested, we measure the 'information' something contains as -log(P), with P the probability that this is the answer. The lower P is, the higher the information contained in this answer. Only Y is very unlikely, so massively informative.
Intuitively, you can see this as follows: if I say that someone is either male or female, that's not very informative, as this is the case for most people (i.e. P is high). If I say someone is male, black, 25y old, has an Italian accent, wears a pink T-shirt and is bald, that's massively informative: it is very unlikely that you'll meet someone else on the street that matches that description. So low probability hits are very informative (although on average, you get the most possible information by chasing 50/50 answer, as it's unlikely that a very specific description will hit, so you're more likely getting the answer that someone is not a black, 25y old male etc., which is not at all informative).
Trying to eliminate as many vowels as possible upfront is not a particularly good strategy. For instance, NYTimes's WordleBot rates "adieu" as only a 79/100 skill rating as an opener (the lower the number of expected turns needed to solve after playing the word in a given scenario, the higher the skill rating. And it's even worse if you play in hard mode, where it gets a skill rating of 59/100 as an opener. There are +100 single-vowel words that are better openers.
True, but this is because the average information gained from adieu is low. I didn’t say anything about optimal guesses (defined by Σp log(p), just that low probability outcomes like no vowels are super informative IF they hit. If adieu is all gray, you get a lot of information (low probability). But on average, you’ll almost always get a hit that there is, eg, an a or e in the word. Many words have that, and you have little consonants to specify further.
The reason adieu is a bad guess, is that vowels are heavily dependent: the probability of an I given that there already is an a and e is much lower than the a priori probability of an I (you only have so many places for vowels). And vice versa, if there is no a or e, there almost always is an i or o. So adding I along with e and a is pretty uninformative, much better to add in common consonants to eliminate a lot of other words (s,l,t,r). This is why slate is so highly rated: no matter the outcome, you get a lot of information from it. Σp log(p) tends to be highest when there is no outcome better than the others (all p are identical). That is roughly true for slate (and the other top words), so it’s a great starter.
The problem is, in wordle you can only guess valid words. So how do you continue from here? You can't guess TNHDL to either find or exclude the next likely consonants, which would be the mathematical strategy.
Also most people don't have a list of all words containing only y as vowel ready in their head. They might remember the solution word if they have some more letters as clues, but they can't produce all remaining options out of the blue.
Therefore, many people will have to use words with vowels to confirm or exclude the next consonants. And using already excluded vowels once again, is a waste of guesses.
They have a green R, so depending on where they placed the R, there's only one possible answer: either MYRRH or TRYST. But yea, I guess most people don't know that these are the only possible words
If you only have vowels cut out, Nymph guarantees the solution in 2. If it's Nymph, it's correct, if it's Glyph, the ph are correct and the y is misplaced, if it's Myrrh, the y and h are correct, and if it's Tryst, the y is misplaced and no other letters are correct.
Actually looking into it, I believe all of the four are able to force the correct answer. Tryst connects to Myrrh singularly with R's and Glyph singularly with its y location, and if neither of those are correct, it's Nymph. Glyph works almost identically to Nymph. Myrrh connects o Nymph with its y, Tryst with its R's, and Glyph without either.
There are more words that only have y as vowel. You are probably right and those are not in the list of possible solutions, only in the allowed list of guesses. But using the list of possible solutions and let a computer filter out the only remaining solutions is basically cheating.
Just wanna clarify, you only get the large amount of information when the unlikely thing actually happens, if you guess 'myrrh' and it comes back all grey, you get very little information
Oh yes that’s what I meant in the ending. Average information of a guess is -Σp log(p). It’s maximised when all potential outcomes of a guess have roughly the same probability.
I'm genuinely confused... is the point not to guess the word? How could using a "vowel dump opener" at all be considered a cheat code? Are you just supposed to try like 5 random words you feel like trying that day and if none of them hit you just give up?
It is, but people will always find a way to establish "skill gaps" or a "this is the optimal/correct way to do this" in order to feel superior to others. Generally, just ignore whatever opinion people give online regarding how you should engage with your hobbies.
However from my understanding there can be a great deal of skill involved in wordle. I've seen 1 or 2 videos of a guy who I thought was some kind of linguist use his knowledge to make some impressive, seemingly educated, guesses. That's awesome to see.
It's a decent strategy masking as a good one. I think the thing that's funny is how bad it fails in cases like this.
You need two guesses to cover all the vowels, and by then you have very little extra information except which vowels are in a word - you basically waste an entire guess on "oh but it HAS to have a vowel and I need to know which one!"
With the exact information from this post (aeiousp missing, r in the right place) there are only 3 possible solutions. If the r was at 3 or 4 there's even only one word left. I'd say that's pretty much well played.
Yes, knowing that the word has an a instead of an e isn't really helpful. It's much easier to figure out which vowels once you know a couple consonants than the other way around.
Tbh they aren’t cheat codes, mathematically they aren’t even the best openers (Slate is for anyone curious) so anyone hating on this strat honestly comes across as petty and a hater to me imo
Grays are just as informative as greens and yellows. I did a deep dive on this last summer, and audio is actually not an optimal word to play as a first guess. If you think of it as a game where the goal isnt to guess the correct word as quickly as possible, but to eliminate as many incorrect words as possible, the optimal words are the ones share the most letters with the most other words, not the words containing the most common letters, because incorrect letters eliminate huge swathes of candidate words.
Consequently, the optimal words to play as a first guess are actually "IRATE" and "ALERT", if you ignore the fact that wordle doesn't reuse words. If you keep track of previously played words, the optimal words actually change over time. I built a little program that plays wordle by shuffling the list of words and playing the ~2300 games necessary to get through all the words, and optimized it for word elimination rather than correct letters, and it was averaging about 3.8 guesses per word on any given run.
Its so funny, because my interpretation was hating on people who play the vowel-dump openers because its statistically sub-optimal and low-skill. Vowel-dump openings give you redundant information. If you guess ADIEU and I and U come up grey, you could process of elimination that A and E are likely vowels (or visa versa), and those two slots could have been used on something else.
Combinations of consonants tend to imply certain vowels, but combinations of vowels rarely imply specific consonants.
Unused consonants and a possible vowel, since y is sometimes a vowel (ex: "rhythms", "lovely", "glyph", "nimph", etc.). Lots people forget that y is sometimes a vowel.
The all vowels first isn’t even optimal, at least not on hard mode. Because it’s trivially easy to get a word with almost any vowel and a consonant of choice, and since there are more consonants it’s better to spread and get as many consonants as you can.
Plus it’s boring to use the same word every day. When I played I never used the same starter word over, or at least tried not to.
I hate people who think like that. It's a game and it affects nobody how you choose to play it. I personally like to start with a different word each time, but I couldn't give a rat's ass if somebody else started with a "cheat" word.
I just play randomly for fun now and then. I use a different opening word because I don't care about strategy. I'm just playing for fun. I recently told a friend of mine that I started the day with I don't know, let's say House. Immediately replied with, "House was the answer three months ago, duh"....
It's a weird obsession but I'll take it over many other obsessions.
Personally, I've always preferred prioritizing common consonants. Every word has vowels and there is only so many to test. Meanwhile, there are much more consonants to keep track of. I'd rather know 2 consonants and test from a list of 6 vowels versus knowing 2 vowels and testing from a list of 21 consonants.
But if you eliminate 10 letters (or 8 in the case of the screen cap), you've a fair bit haven't you? How many 5-letter words have a Y (and in this case R) and no vowels?
If after two guesses you know that the word has no vowel other than Y, you're in a fairly strong position, to be fair.
I'm not defending vowel-heavy starts, I start with SHIRT and follow that up with FUDGY if it's all grey, but I don't think the above is a good argument against them.
Yup I get hate for doing OUIJA followed by STYLE to fill out as mang common letters as possible. I always have tended to approach puzzles from optimization over valuing the "spirit" of the game
Yeah, but for the experienced players, ruling out the "normal" vowels makes it practically a gimme. The list of five-letter words with only Y's is easy to memorize.
The optimized players are the ones who know that words like "adieu, audio, ouija, etc" aren't actually the starting words that give the most information... so its actually the people who know that its optimal to start with words like salet, crane, raise, etc that contain a mix of the highest-frequency consonants and vowels joking about the people who assert that words like adieu, audio, and especially ouija (j is the least common letter in wordle and u is the least common vowel lmfao) are "good starting words"
ADIEU, et al, is not optimized. Vomiting out a ton of vowels in your early guesses is actually just objectively bad, from either the perspective of solving in fewer steps or the perspective of avoiding getting caught in a weird pattern and actually losing the game. The actual information-theory optimized approaches (such as what the Wordlebot suggests) use a balance of common consonants and vowels, with opening guesses that have 2 vowels like most words do.
The actual advantage that the vowel-dump strategy has is that it's easy to use and makes it easy to come up with guesses. If you're trying to solve the puzzle quickly in time, and don't care about your number of guesses (or failing occasionally), it's fine.
I actually open with either zero vowels (CRYPT is a great opener) or one. This approach is less likely to get quick solves, but is very good at avoiding getting stuck at the end and losing. Currently still at 100% after 1426 solves.
When I played wordle I did words with as much RSTLNE as possible to start, and vowels. I didn’t know other people hated this and I came up with it myself as it appeared to be the most efficient way to complete the puzzle. I never got a single one wrong.
Also, learning the vowel(s) is not as effective as people think. If you're down to one letter missing, I'd rather be choosing between SHAVE and SHOVE than SHAVE, SHADE, SHARE, SHAKE, SHAPE, SHALE, and SHAME
Those first two guesses come back all gray, you’ve spent half your lives learning almost nothing, and you’re now staring at a keyboard of unused consonants.
You’ve eliminated 99.999% of words. In that case it could not have been more helpful.
I don't get this because if you play A E I O and U in your first two guesses and they all come back gray, you've learned a MASSIVE amount of information. There are not too many English words that use Y as the only vowel.
I wish wordle would open up the Welsh w as a vowel. The only two English words I've seen in dictionaries that use it are cwm (naturally occurring stone ampitheater, like a hanging glacier valley) and crwth, a type of musical instrument.
I once did that I realized a problem, you got the vowels but little to no consonant to make something, eventually I found 3 words for wordle that uses all vowels and majority of consonants. LEMON, STAIR, PUDGY. I have been using this eversince and managed to solve the wordle of the day
I don't know what a wordle is, so i tried to read comments to find out. I read this one, and even though it is 5am for me and i have not slept yet, i feel driven to go downstairs and take a hearty swig of whiskey straight from the bottle.
I have ceased ny search as I don't want to know anymore. The wordle will remain unknown and that is something that is right in this cursed world.
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u/lightning_Mcking29 4d ago
It’s “punishment” because the vowel-dump openers (ADIEU, AUDIO, OUIJA, etc.) are a cheat-code that only works if the answer actually has A/E/I/O/U.
Almost every Wordle does. A handful don’t — they only use Y (MYRRH, NYMPH, GLYPH, TRYST…). Those first two guesses come back all gray, you’ve spent half your lives learning almost nothing, and you’re now staring at a keyboard of unused consonants.
People who hate that optimized style treat the rare no-vowel day as the puzzle slapping the spreadsheet players. That’s the joke.