Wordle players are cheating every day, mathematician says (2024)

FAQs

What percentage of people get Wordle correct every day? ›

But statistics show that, on average, 0.2 to 0.5 per cent of people guess right on the first try – between five and 12 times more than chance would suggest. Put another way: Of the roughly 2 million daily Wordle players, about 860 people should be guessing the right word on their first try.

Some days it went as high as 0.5 per cent, or about 10,000 players. Previous research by Alexandra Wormley and Adam Cohen at Arizona State University showed that residents of north-eastern states such as Massachusetts and Vermont were most likely to search Wordle answers on Google.

Peeking at somebody else's screen when they're solving is cheating. Googling “Wordle answer” is cheating.

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.

The US is ranked #18 in the world for Wordle, with a national average of 3.92. The American state with the best Wordle average is North Dakota (3.65). The US city with the best Wordle scores is Saint Paul, Minnesota, with an average of 3.51. Probability of guessing correctly in two tries is 6.4785%.

3. More people solve Wordle on their first guess than can be explained by chance. In the list above, we excluded first guesses that were that day's Wordle solution. That's because, about one game in every 250, a reader gets the answer right on the first try.

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.”

Use an Online Wordle Solver

There exist several Wordle word finders that take in your current tries and give out the answers. I found one of them and tried it multiple times to succeed. All you need to do is enter your green letters in that exact order, along with the yellow and greyed-out ones.

You can't cheat as you are only ever playing the game with yourself. Do whatever you like. Wordle is a logic puzzle.

What is the secret to playing Wordle? ›

Start with a word that has a lot of vowels.

Some Wordle players have found success in starting with a word that has several vowels in it. “Adieu,” “audio” or “canoe,” for instance, may be good words to start with because at least three out of the five letters are vowels.

But knowing what's gone before is important, because Wordle answers don't repeat – so you could easily be wasting guesses.

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.

Because very few people fail at a given Wordle (typically around 3%), I use the percent of people who use all six guesses, whether they win (6/6) or fail (X/6) as a proxy for a word's difficulty. This percentage varies quite a bit, suggesting that some answers are definitely harder than others.

3. More people solve Wordle on their first guess than can be explained by chance. In the list above, we excluded first guesses that were that day's Wordle solution. That's because, about one game in every 250, a reader gets the answer right on the first try.

So RATIO first, then MENDS, then LUCKY. That's it. With those three choices, you'll have slimmed down the list of possible letters to the point that figuring out the solution with your final guesses becomes significantly easier. It's not a surefire winning strategy for every day's puzzle.