This is a companion web site for the paper
Ronald I. Greenberg. Effective Wordle Heuristics.
July 18, 2025 News: This day the NYT chose a solution word not on the previously published list of possible solution words. The word is on the original list of 12,972 allowed guess words, but most of those words are very obscure and unlikely to appear as a solution. Wordlebot (see below) says Wordle actually now has an even larger list of 15,000 allowed guess words admitted to be mostly very obscure. It thus seems unwise to generally target words beyond the 3158 known possible solutions. WordleBot says it has a list of 3200 words it considers to be plausible solutions, with probabilities assigned to each one based on Times usage frequency (albeit with no plurals, for example). This list does not seem to be public, so here I am going to just put up with strategy suggestions that will fail, on rare occasions with a very hard word. The strategies here will still be very helpful for narrowing the possible solutions, and then you will have to see what you can do on your own. The 7/18/25 solution word was unfamiliar to me though I have discovered a NYT article using the word. I was very stuck, despite determining the word ends with "oris". The allowed guess list includes at least "doris", "goris", "horis", "loris", "noris", and "zoris". So it seems pretty hopeless to automate the guessing without using the NYT usage statistics, which also don't seem to be public. According to WordleBot, after the first two guesses suggested by my strategy for today, there was only one possible solution, and about a third of Wordle solvers who reached that point went to the correct word, "loris". So I will have to admit that I do not have fast heuristics to always beat well-read competitors, but you will continue to do very well following the strategies provided here. (This is not necessarily fun for most people, but I feel good about using these strategies, since I did do my own programming work to find them, and there is still an opportunity to exercise some judgment in the later stages based on one's intuition about NYT frequency.)
Based on that work, a daily recommended Wordle strategy is provided. These daily recommended strategies take into account the past Wordle history and assume that solutions are not reused. These daily recommended strategies are provided as of the first public day of Wordle on June 19, 2021, but as if the current list of possible solutions was in effect from that time. This current solution list used by the New York Times official version of Wordle contains 3158 words. The strategies provided here make guesses guesses only from this list of 3158 words, but does not restrict to hard mode.
The strategies recommended here do not use information about the frequency of words in the New York Times or elsewhere, unlike the way that WordleBot works. (See Introducing Wordlebot and Introducing Wordlebot 2.0.) Nonetheless, it has been observed that the New York Times is rarely using words introduced when it expanded the list of possible solution words to 3158 words, so when all else is equal in heuristic evaluation, a guess is chosen from the 2302 older words neither added nor removed by the New York Times. (WordleBot does not use the history of past solutions, so users with a good memory or the tool here may be able to do better than WordleBot. This can be especially true if as you go through the recommended strategy you look at the end game situation and consider choosing a more common word from among those remaining as possible solutions.)
The C code used to create a new recommended Wordle strategy each day is also provided. (Additionally, shell scripts grab the new Wordle solution each day and invoke the C program to generate a new heuristic strategy.) Based on the New York Times release of each day's Wordle word early the prior morning (in US Central Daylight Savings Time), a recommended strategy is created within a couple hours of that time to guess the Wordle word two days hence.