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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

['brick', 'glent', 'jumpy', 'vozhd', 'waqfs']

"Optimal coverage" in the article title refers to unique letters. It's not the case that playing these is optimal, due to frequencies and position-density of letters (obviously).

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TIL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vozhd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waqf

How many such (arguably) obscure words are there in the Wordle word list?

Also, how many words are not on the list? I tried “Punic” today (granted that might be considered obscure as well) and it wasn’t accepted. I just checked “Dutch” and it is okay while “Irish” is not.

Possibly attributable to the definition of “(going) dutch” as “splitting the bill”?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dutch

Isn't Punic a proper noun? Those are excluded from most word games.

Apparently there are two word lists: one for the word to be guessed and one to validate user guesses. I imagine vozhd and waqf would appear in the latter lit but not in the former.

The words are unique in each list, so the validation is on the combined set.

The NYT article suggests that one person validated the list—however that one person is an avid word game player, and is in fact the developer’s partner, for whom the game was created—so said validator likely had a deep vocabulary of highly arcane words!

I wrote a script that finds the word that gives the smallest average number of possibilities left (across all possible actual solutions) and came up with "raise". "cloth" is often a good second word, but it depends of course.

raise and arise aren't too bad (and atone with traditional "etoain shrdlu") but my suspicion based on:

grep -P '^[a-z]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/$.$/\1\n/g' | grep -Pv '^\s$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | xargs

42 q 70 j 89 x 97 z 261 v 418 w 445 f 480 k 549 g 557 b 636 y 646 h 647 m 757 p 793 c 828 u 990 d 1027 n 1266 t 1268 i 1305 l 1468 o 1488 r 1848 a 2443 e 2552 s

and:

$ grep -P '^[a-z]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/$.$/\1\n/g' | grep -Pv '^\s$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -n 10 | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs | rev

s e a r o l i t n d

for a bit more readability, is that "arose" is a better starting word for 5 letter english words.

That said, the difference between the i and the o is not large, so both probably work well.

I often struggle to find a matching second word when I start with soare or raise. I wonder if somebody did try to optimize for a first word that makes it easy to come up with a second quess statistically.

In a way it's supposed to be hard, because there will often be only a handful of options left.

I took into account the position constraints you learn from the game after entering the word too. This is why "raise" beats "arise" for example.

oh. that's an excellent point. I hadn't thought about that. right letter wrong place is far less useful than right letter right place.

hm. again I don't know what dictionary he's using, but using /usr/share/dict/words and some more shell I get:

1st: 303 t 305 p 343 b 370 c 629 s

2nd: 404 u 511 e 530 i 699 o 758 a

3rd: 325 n 370 r 405 o 444 i 515 a

4th: 253 a 299 l 313 n 358 t 1013 e

5th: 291 t 394 d 472 y 495 e 1506 s

So.. I guess unsurprisingly ending a word in "es" is the way to go and an "a" is 2nd is pretty good closely followed by "o"

With those values "cares" or "bares" seems like a better bet? It gets you that popular r in 3rd, and the ending es...

> right letter wrong place is far less useful than right letter right place

It's not that easy. If you're guessing the most common position for a letter, you may not be gaining the maximum amount of information.

The heuristics approach you're using won't beat brute force evaluation of all possible guesses for all possible solutions (which is only a few million combinations).

Well, part of the goal is also to finish in less than 6 guesses, so surely an optimal starting pattern is best. And since you can't do better than each letter being unique, you might as well ensure those unique letters are both common and ideally positioned. From that point on, the remaining words I guess you could brute force, or combine statistical with statistical to cover best letters first.

I'm sure brute forcing will probably guarantee a win almost always, but will it be, for example a 3 or 4 word win which is pretty easy to do for a human.

Doing a similar analysis on the enable2k word list comes up with a slightly different order:

s e a o r i l t n d

And with the actual word list from the game,

e a r o t l i s n c

I took the letter words from the enable2k word list, and calculated the letter frequency. It is not the same as it is for all English words.

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