8 ms·
Every possible Wordle solution visualized
- mk_stjames 4y agoThe word list being checked against isn't quite the same as whatever Wordle is using for possible guesses (this is mentioned on the page); for example, "DUCKY" is a valid Wordle guess, but shown as invalid when entered into this tool. The original Wordle word list was contained in plaintext in the game's javascript (which is what is used for this map), however I believe the current version used on NYT is using a different list. I don't know that the current set of guessable possibilities / the list of words possible to be chosen is known. I think some people have mentioned the list may have been expanded.
- q845712 4y agoI clicked on the 'z's and noticed the same for "WHIZZ" I guess the article does say: > Note that these words only represent the list Wordle uses for possible solutions; there are many more guessable 5-letter words.
- fsckboy 4y agowhat you say is somewhat correct, but this site says that these are the valid answers, not including the valid guesses, so DUCKY wouldn't be expected here. personally, I'd prefer a tool that included all balid guesses and wouldn't lead me so precisely to answers. there's small c cheating and big C Cheating :) the tweaks introduced by the Times, etc., yes.
- TylerE 4y agoWordle has been trivially cheatable from day one using any of the gazillion scrabble solvers out there. Treat unknown positions as wildcards.
- samtho 4y agoAt the risk of sounding like your fourth grade teacher, you’re only cheating yourself. I would argue that using a dictionary is a tactic and one to better help you better play the game by introducing you to the idea of a decision tree. You can ask Wordlebot how you did and see how it approaches the problem with all the knowledge short of knowing the actual word.
- TylerE 4y agoObviously. I’m not saying I do itZ I was just confused why GP thought being able to cheat at wordle is somehow new.
- fsckboy 4y agoi wasn't thinking it was new, so wasn't trying to say that, i was talking about what constitutes cheating by degrees.
- ghaff 4y agoI did use Word Hippo as a bit of a crutch sometimes when I was starting out and got stuck but haven't looked at it in many months.
- adrianmonk 4y agoIt depends on whether you play for the love of puzzles or the love of words. If the appeal is puzzle solving, then you may want to use a dictionary as part of exploring a puzzle solving technique. If the appeal is words, then you may enjoy plumbing the depths of what words you know, why you know them, and how they are put together.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoThe important point is that there are 2 lists: 1. Words that can be entered as valid guesses 2. Words that are ever used as solutions in Wordle I think this is a great design choice (and IIRC was part of the original game). That is, Wordle doesn't want to use really obscure or uncommon slang words as the solution, as that would make the game less enjoyable (I wouldn't like it so much if the solution was a word I'd never heard of). But, when I get stuck and can't think of a word that will fit as my next guess, sometimes I just go into "mash keyboard mode" so hopefully I'll find something that will fit and get more information about the solution. More often than not something fits, and I'm usually surprised my guess is an actual word. So, to your point, DUCKY is a valid guess but will never be an actual solution in Wordle.
- CamperBob2 4y agoI'm still sore over HUNKY.
- ghaff 4y agoSlangy words seem to be one area where Wordle can be all over the map where something may be a valid solution or it may not even be a valid guess.
- mortenjorck 4y agoWhile I had kind of intuited this (I’ve developed my strategy over time to always favor the more common word when choosing among multiple possibilities), I didn’t realize some of the places where Wordle cuts its solution set. Specifically, I somehow never noticed that solutions are never s-suffixed plural, but you can clearly see it in the visualization if you try entering a word with four letters.
- carlmr 4y ago>I somehow never noticed that solutions are never s-suffixed plural This is something I noticed that improved my wordle scores a lot.
- RexM 4y agoI really like this visualization of the possible words with the known information. It’s possible to have two yellow letters in the same position, but it doesn’t look like it’s possible to represent that with this.
- jameshart 4y agoAlso no way to inform it that you have seen a yellow+green for a repeated letter.
- ar9av 4y agoVery nice. I think the NYT has been tweaking the word list a bit. I know they've removed a few words, but don't know if they've added any. I don't know how much the list has drifted over time.
- keyle 4y agoI still play Wordle daily with my folks. Gets the juices flowing and gets daily conversations started. Anyway, HORSE was used like 3 days apart. I was shocked, and annoyed. See, if I were to write Wordle, which arguably I did too (see http://curdle.me http://curdle.me) but I digress, I'd make an array of all words, randomize it, store that, match one per day and call it done. Years worth of fun. But that doesn't appear to be what NYT is doing, they pick a random word every day? Which means that my evil plan of starting every single day with the same word might never get a N1 or I might get it more than once in a year!
- brokensegue 4y agoYou are mistaken https://wordfinder.yourdictionary.com/wordle/answers/ https://wordfinder.yourdictionary.com/wordle/answers/ Wordle answers are now hand picked each day by an editor.
- keyle 4y agoYou are correct, I think what has happened is I confused WORSE and HORSE and must have used HORSE when it was incorrect but remembered it as the solution. Thanks for the correction!
- BurningFrog 4y agoMy impression of that announcement was that the editor sometimes handpicks a word, but it's still mostly random.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- oliwary 4y agoCool! I love this kind of intuitive exploratory visualizations. I wonder how it could be done for my 5x5 letter wordle variant https://squareword.org https://squareword.org. Technically you would need 25 small alphabets, one for each letter. But that seems tricky to fit on a screen in such a visually pleasing way. Will have to look into if there would be a better way :)
- TuringTest 4y agoSome advice: you may want to improve the instructions of the game. There's no clear indication of what to do when the first 5-letter word has been typed - it merely bumps the word if you type more letters, or shows a cryptic message "Type your guess on the keyboard to begin!" if the square is clicked. As for visualizations, you may want to take a look at mathematical relations [1]. Each cell is a variable with the alphabet as its domain (which is pruned as you guess correct values), and the words are 5-arity relations between rows and columns. You may represent the local relations surrounding the cell pointed by the mouse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relation_(mathematics)#Representation_of_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relation_(mathematics)#Represe...
- charles_f 4y agoSince we're talking about wordle dictionary there, I find it relevant to plug this in - the best words to solve wordle https://www.fev.al/posts/wordle/ https://www.fev.al/posts/wordle/
- sarthak927 4y ago[dead]
- graderjs 4y agoI love how E is common in every position except the first. I discovered something interesting with ChatGPT. It finds the following really hard: Can you make me 5 words, where each word has the letter E, as follows: E---- -E--- --E-- ---E- ----E ChatGPT3.5: Eager Exile Cheese Temple Embrace I tried it with ChatGPT4 too, but got similar fail results, but history is currently down and I hit my "25 messages in 3 hours" cap.
- yreg 4y agoGPT 4: Elope Defer Mover Aisle Plume If you think about it, it's pretty cool that we are at the stage where GPT not being able to satisfy such request correctly is 'interesting'.
- jstx1 4y agoChatGPT is surprisingly bad at Wordle - ask for 5 letter words with some constraints and it regularly returns 6+ letter words.
- nashashmi 4y agoToo much logic required here. Change to "...guess five letter word Where e is the first letter. Do it again where e is the second letter." And so on.
- graderjs 4y agoDid you try that? What did you get? :) ;p xx ;p
- dragontamer 4y agoI know everyone has their "Starting Word" by this point, but this graphic seems very good at discovering good starting words. "SLATE" seems to have a huge number of solutions on each letter: 300+ words available on S----, 400+ words available on ----E. The smallest is -L----, which has 200 words, still a good size all else considered. I'm not too sure on how to evaluate the "best starting word", but maybe I'll try "SLATE" next time I play Wordle. EDIT: Some people are interested in "two starting words". Seems like "ROBIN" hits a lot of words that SLATE misses. -O--- in the 2nd letter was the most common letter+position after the letters S L A T and E were banned. "CHILD" also seems like another good followup word after SLATE.
- Hnrobert42 4y agoFrom this I concluded the best starting word is FEAST. Each column has a high likelihood of being correct. And damn if I didn’t get today’s Wordle on the second guess with this strategy. Anecdotal data FTW!
- ghaff 4y agoWordlebot likes SLATE and LEAST a bit better. But, yeah, mix of common consonants and vowels. I also think I've found that mixing things up because your usual word did really well the day before doesn't really seem to be a good strategy because if the solution is a lot different, just eliminating some of the most common letters is still pretty effective.
- madcaptenor 4y agoIs there some tendency for a starting word that does well one day to do poorly the next day? I know Original Wordle was randomized so there wouldn't be, but now that there's editing there might be.
- ghaff 4y agoI don't know. I'll sometimes mix things up a bit if, say, I get 4 letters out of SLATE on a day. (I sometimes will use CRANE which is still very high on the starting words list.) At the same time though, even if SLATE were to come up empty the next day, that's a lot of negative information.
- wodenokoto 4y agoIf the author is reading: zero probability and near zero have indistinguishable colors. That should be considered an error. Any letter that isn't impossible should be clearly labelled as possible. Right now you get lines pointing to semingly black letters, which looks like a mistake in the visualization.
- shriracha 4y agoAuthor here! This is great feedback that I just implemented. Thanks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tremarley 4y agoWill this be open sourced? I'd love to see a version with more than 5 letters & a word list injection
- ghaff 4y agoThere are a ton of variants out there including more letters and more words and I'm sure there's Javascript you can download whether or not you still can from the Times. I have to say I played around with a number of these at one point but I really ended up coming back to just playing Wordle once a day. The multi-word ones in particular really force a different playing style.
- prof-dr-ir 4y agoIt looks beautiful, but am I the only one who is irked by the fact that the lines cannot be joined at will? For example, if I type PO_N_ there are two allowed words (POINT and POUND) but this particular visualization does not distinguish them from POIND and POUNT.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blowski 4y agoTangent to the Wordle tool posted. Is PerThirtySix a reference to FiveThirtyEight? The latter must be one of the most well-known brands in the sports analytics space. Or is 36 an important number in sports?
- EA 4y agoYes. NBA games are 48 minutes in regulation. No one plays the full 48 minutes, but a lot of players (starters mainly) do play 36 minutes. So, 36 minutes has become a common time period of production time used for analytics in the NBA.
- blowski 4y agoAh I see, like on this page - https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2021_per_minute.html https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2021_per_mi.... Thanks!
- clircle 4y agoI think this visualization would be a lot more informative if it was ... just a list of all the five letter words. lol. I swear, data scientists just visualize things because they can, and don't think about what information they want people to take away.
- shriracha 4y agoMaker of the visualization here! Curious how you would use a plaintext list of 2309 words to get at some of the questions I mentioned on the tool, like "how many words use Y as the only vowel?".
- bnralt 4y agoDo you play Wordle? I actually thought this was interesting, since it’s something I’ve often wondered while playing it. “The first letter is U and the fourth is E, how big the set of possible answers is now?”
- madcaptenor 4y agoThis is a nice visualization. A feature request: I'd like to be able to enter more than one "yellow" letter in a given position.
- shriracha 4y agoMaker of the visualization here! Super cool to see all of the great feedback here. Thanks for checking it out.
- mym1990 4y agoIs the site inspired by FiveThirtyEight or Nate Silver in general? Very nifty, highly performant, and takes me back to when FiveThirtyEight was just a small stats blog.
- shriracha 4y agoThank you! My friend and I started this project pretty early on during COVID. FiveThirtyEight was definitely a design influence, along with pudding.cool, some NYT pieces, and others. There are some things on the data side that FiveThirtyEight does sports which I'm not a fan of, like their emphasis on "all in one" metrics to measure performance, but overall they definitely do a great job with their presentation.
- lifefeed 4y agoDoes Wordle not allow plurals or past tense? DARES and CARES aren't in this visualization, neither are DARED or CARED. I know those simple words don't come up often, but I don't know if they're actually not allowed.
- jtokoph 4y agoI believe they are not possible
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jerome-jh 4y agoAt least "xenon" is missing.