Daily Recommended Wordle Strategy

Taking into account Wordle history (and assuming solutions are not reused), a recommended strategy, computed by a fast heuristic, is presented below. (See Alex Selby's How_to_use_a_strategy_file.)

Uses the updated New York Times solutions list of 3158 words (as if that was in effect from the start of Wordle) and makes guesses only from this list, but does not restrict to hard mode. When all else is equal in heuristic evaluation, a guess is chosen from the 2302 older words neither added nor removed by the NYT.

Note that since the NYT actually takes into account the frequency of words when choosing the daily solution, it might be wise to not follow the "recommended" strategy blindly but rather to look at the end stage where few possible solutions remain and use your own judgment; in some cases, you may want to use a more common word from among the possible solutions if it won't hurt the worst-case performance.

Note that as of April 24, 2025, two slight tweaks are being introduced into strategy files:

  1. Words belonging to the list of 2302 older Wordle words are capitalized; they seem to be much more likely to appear as solutions.
  2. When the strategy file recommends a word that is not a possible solution at that stage, either based on color responses obtained so far or based on Wordle history, the word is followed by >, which character then introduces each of the immediate possible color results after guessing that word. Thus the user will know the guess is being made to hedge bets for future steps rather than because the guess actually could be the solution. In situations, where there are few words in the continuation of the tree that come from the older 2302 words, or some of the possible solutions just seem like they would be rare words in the New York Times, then the user might want to examine the remaining possibilities and gamble on a choice other than the one calculated to minimize the worst-case number of remaining steps.

Further background at http://rig.cs.luc.edu/~rig/wordle. 






 Last updated
 on 23-Apr-25 at 08:02 CDT
 by Ronald I. Greenberg 
 (rig at cs.luc.edu)