While there's no single "every day" percentage, typically only a tiny fraction (around 1-4%) of players win Wordle in one guess, but surprisingly high numbers (thousands daily) achieve this, suggesting many users look up answers or use common starting words, while most players (around 78%) solve it within 3 to 5 guesses, with the overall average being around 4-5 guesses. Facebook +3
What is a good Wordle average score? Many regular players aim for an average between 3.5 and 4.0. That means regularly solving the puzzle in 3 goes, to compensate for those days when you get a 4 or higher.
After adding the sharing function, Wordle became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021. Subsequently, the game's player base rose greatly: from 90 players on November 1, 2021 to over 300,000 by January 2, 2022, and more than 2 million a week later.
What Wordle gets very right is in its community. Everyone gets the same word every day, and those words come from a curated list. Players can share their results, with the coveted goal of finding the correct word quickly.
Tracy Bennett (née Pinkham) is an editor and puzzle editor. She edits The New York Times Games products Wordle and Strands.
A popular 3-word Wordle trick involves using words that cover common letters and vowels to quickly narrow down possibilities, with examples including RATIO, MENDS, LUCKY or LEARN, HOIST, DUCKY, aiming to eliminate most letters by the third guess, making the final solution much easier to find. The core idea is to maximize information from early guesses, often focusing on diverse letters like common consonants and multiple vowels.
On average 95% of target words can be solved within six guesses, with an average game length of approximately 4 rounds.
This once-a-day game is typically used as a brain teaser exercise by its users. While it doesn't directly make your brain smarter, the effects of playing it do prove positive. First, it provides you with a challenge to overcome. Every user does this differently by using their own strategizing methods.
The word with 645 meanings is "run," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This number refers specifically to the verb form, making it the most complex word in English, surpassing the former record-holder, "set". Its vast meanings range from physical movement to operating machines, managing businesses, and extending in a direction, a versatility that grew with societal changes like the Industrial Revolution.
The two best words to start Wordle often focus on common letters like E, A, R, S, T, and O, with top pairs including CLINT and SOARE, or RAISE and CLONE (or similar combos like SLATE/TRACE for one word) to maximize letter discovery and reduce possibilities quickly, though vowel-heavy starts like ADIEU/AUDIO are popular for finding vowels first.
By comparison, ADIEU — the most common starting word among Wordle players — trails TRACE by about a fifth of a guess, adding up to 74 extra turns for the bot over the course of a year. In addition to reader guesses, we rely on data sources like usage frequency in The New York Times.
A glut of games
“There are more players today, but there are also more games per player. Since you can't spend as much time on each game, you're less likely to finish the one in front of you.” Not only did gamers have more time in the eight- and 16-bit days, but they had fewer games to complete.
Wordle's addictive nature comes from a perfect blend of psychological triggers, social engagement, and simple design, utilizing scarcity (one puzzle a day) to create craving, immediate dopamine hits for solving, and social sharing for validation and community, all within a quick, satisfying format that turns everyone into a language detective.
Most people should, on average, get it in at least 4, even on days where it is harder. Especially if you aren't making risky moves, four guesses should supply you with enough information to make a correct guess.
ROATE is the mathematically optimal first guess in Wordle. RAISE is very slightly less good, but gives you a chance of a hole-in-one. Wordle is solved!
You get points for each word you create based on the value of the tiles used in the word. 2. You get 35 extra points if you play all 7 tiles in one move!
Why 'Run' Is The Most Complex Word in the English Language. This pithy word may only be three letters long, but it's deceptively complex: According to one lexicographer, it has 645 distinct definitions. English can be hard for other language speakers to learn.
Yes, agathokakological is a real, albeit rare, word, an adjective meaning "composed of both good and evil," coined by poet Robert Southey in the 1830s from Greek roots for "good" (agathos) and "bad" (kakos). It's considered a nonce word (a word created for a single occasion) and isn't in common usage, but it's officially recognized by dictionaries like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary.
SEXTUPLE Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com.
Wordle doesn't have a public "banned words list," but The New York Times, which owns the game, removes obscure, offensive, or potentially sensitive words (like slurs or certain COVID-related terms) from its solution list to keep it accessible and appropriate, while also removing words that are too hard to guess or have confusing secondary meanings. Some words removed include agora, lynch, slave, wench, and fetus, while many common curse words remain in the dictionary of possible guesses but aren't solution words.
90% of the brain develops before age 5.
The brain is most flexible and adaptable to learning during the earliest years, and as the brain matures, it is less capable of reorganizing and adapting to new or unexpected challenges.
If you're not familiar, the Myers-Briggs personality categorization places people into 16 different types based on a detailed questionnaire. Out of the sixteen types, two of them are most likely to enjoy puzzles – ISFJ (sentinel defender) and INFJ (diplomat advocate).
Since there are 2,315 possible target words in Wordle, the probability that you will guess the target in exactly one try is 1/2315 = 0.000432. In fact, it doesn't matter which of the 2,315 words in the dictionary you choose to use as your initial guess since the probability of success is always 1/2315.
According to Little, “retrieving words and checking if they fit the Wordle clues would involve working memory, which is the ability to keep information active, manipulate, and update information. And working memory is correlated with intelligence.”
Indeed, it has long been documented by psychiatrists and other medical professionals that games like Wordle aren't just fun but are in fact helpful for maintaining proper cognitive function, particularly in older people.