In early March I speculated about the balance of luck and strategy in WORDLE. You can see that here. In this post I'm just going to update the stats for how often each letter was used in March.
If you go back to to the March post (about February) you can see the details of the February numbers to compare to the March totals. Just remember there were three more days in March, so that adds 15 letters (five a day.)
Last time I posted my overall stats for the end of February. I realize now I didn't save a screenshot of those for the end of March. But my numbers improved - another 2, and a lot more 3s than 4's and a few 5s and 6s. (Things got much worse in April, but that's for another post.)
If you look for patterns you can probably find what you're looking for. How many days in a row do they use one or more letters from the previous day's word? They followed EPOXY with NYMPH! The lesson: don't assume anything can't happen.
Through March, they still haven't used simple plurals that end in S, or simple past tenses that end in ED.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF LETTERS (for February 2022 then March 2022)
Vowels
A = 12 times in 11 different words
E = 12 times in 12 different words
E = 21 times in 17 different words
Y = 1 time in 1 word
Here are some more observations about the vowels (Remember this is just February 2022):
WORDS WITH JUST ONE VOWEL - 6/28
WORDS WITH JUST ONE VOWEL - 7/31
WORDS WITH TWO DIFFERENT VOWELS - 19/28 13/31
WORDS WITH THE SAME VOWEL USED TWICE - 2/28 (ELDER and VIVID)
-5/31 (RUPEE, AHEAD, SWEET, TEASE, RENEW)
WORDS WITH THREE VOWELS - 1/28 (ONE DOUBLE) (AROMA) - 6/31 (FOUR WITH ONE LETTER USED TWICE, LISTED ABOVE)
IF A WORD HAD ONLY ONE VOWEL - IT WAS ALWAYS THE MIDDLE LETTER
IN MARCH THAT WAS NOT TRUE FOR ALL (NASTY, MONTH)
VOWEL IS FIRST LETTER - 6/28 (A=2 E=1 I=0 O=1 U=2) 3/31 (AHEAD, ALLOW, EPOXY)
CONSONANTS (WAS MOST TO LEAST FREQUENT IN FEBRUARY, BUT SEEMED MORE USEFUL TO PUT THE SAME LETTERS NEXT TO EACH OTHER THIS TIME.) SAME FIVE LETTERS ON TOP, BUT THE ORDER CHANGED.
NOTE: I did the chart before I did the BLACK=FEBRUARY, RED=MARCH scheme.
- C = 7 5
- D = 5 5
- K = 5 0
- M= 4 5
- N = 4 7
- P = 3 6
- V = 3 (Twice in VIVID) 1
- M = 3 5
- B = 2 1
- F = 2 1
- G = 1 1
- W = 1 5
- X = 1
- J, Q, X, Z = 0 J,K, Q, Z =0
The earlier post has some thoughts about what I found and some strategies. It doesn't seem to make sense to repeat it. For the most part there aren't significant changes in letter frequencies, except for E. Less so for K and W. NYMPH was probably the trickiest word, but EPOXY was a close second. You can go to the previous WORDLE post to see what I wrote if you want.
I believe that Wordle does not use simple plurals (ending in S) as word-of-the-day. I just recently learned that there are two kinds of words: those on the short list, which can be word-of-the-day, and those accepted as 5-letter words that you can enter as guesses but cannot be puzzle solutions. Not sure I was happy to learn this; seems like a kind of Catch-22.
ReplyDeleteKathleen, Do you have a source for that? It does appear that plurals and simple past tense words are not used as words of the day. But are you saying other words are also not used? Words that are regular words they just decided can't be words of the day? Because I seen a wide range of words from fairly boring ones like THOSE to more exotic ones like CYNIC or VIVID.
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