Selecting optimum seed words for wordle using character statistics

Abstract

Wordle, a word guessing game rose to global popularity in the December of 2021. The goal of the game is to guess a five-letter English word within six tries. Each try provides the player with hints by means of colour changing tiles which inform whether or not a given character is part of the solution as well as, in cases where it is part of the solution, whether or not it is in the correct placement. Numerous attempts have been made to find the best starting word and best strategy to solve the daily Wordle. This study uses character statistics of five-letter words to determine the best three starting words. We show that our proposed starting words perform better than the currently available suggested word configurations across three distinct data sets: of which, two are drawn from the official Wordle word database.