Wordle 934 2/6*
ALONE
LINER
…didn’t really think that would work.
Wordle 934 3/6
PLANT
LONER
LINER
So close!
Wordle 934 4/6
COATI
RESIN
BRINE
LINER
Grrr. I was so pleased with BRINE that I missed seeing the -ER ending. Should have waited until the coffee kicked in.
(I like SunUp’s chances for a two today!)
Wordle 934 2/6
RAISE
LINER
I’ve been on a lucky streak here lately.
I just started to do Wordle, so that today’s was only the fourth one I’ve done. So I’m still figuring this out. The first question is what word to start with, so I’ve been using the previous day’s solution for today’s first guess. So final let me to liner in one step. Anyone have a suggestion for how to begin?
Wordle 934 3/6
STERN
ALOUD
FINAL
Welcome to the game @Dewey_Finn . You’ve hit on the key question with the game. There are many discussions about that in the first Wordle thread, when most of us started playing after @Briny_Deep brought it to our attention.
Extensive discussions there about how to start. It might be best to point you to that instead of rehashing it all again. That thread reached its limit of 10,000 posts and then the system created this one. There is some discussion here about what you ask too, but most of it is in that first thread when we all were trying to figure it out.
Many of us had good suggestions and strategies but to me one guy was especially helpful and that was @EllisDee .
So I suggest you find his posts in that first thread.
Good luck and welcome to the game!
HTH,
@Bullitt
Wordle 934 4/6*
SLATE
LOVER
LEPER <—dumb guess. it probably wouldn’t be a Wordle word.
LINER
GAAAAHHHHH! WORD TRAP!
Wordle 934 6/6
CRANE - This should be quick
INERT
RINSE - Or not. . .
DINER - Nooooooooo!
MINER
LINER - At least I didn’t pick “finer”
Wordle 934 2/6* 1/9/2024
FINAL → (George Takei voice) “Oh, my”. LIN??, could be LINEN, but that doubles up the N… LINES is regular plural, LINED past tense, LINI/LINO/LINU go nowhere (though I’d try LINUX if a 2 wasn’t at stake). LINNY? LINTY? Nah. Or LINDY… ah, archaic, and a nickname. Let’s go with the very straghtforward
LINER
@Wheelz, you know me too well! I think I’ll buy a lottery ticket today. (Actually, no I won’t. Lottery’s still a bad idea.)
The first thing to know is that this game was originally written by a random dude for his girlfriend and their friend group. As such, answers are all commonly used, inoffensive words. Valid guesses, however, can be anything. The most obscure Scrabble words are valid guesses, just not valid solutions. Standard past tense words made by adding ED and standard plurals made by adding S are not included in the valid answer list.
Unsurprisingly, the Wheel of Fortune strategy of guessing the letters RSTLNE is pretty darn effective.
If you go into the game settings, you can turn on hard mode if you like. The idea of hard mode is that you have to replay green letters in place, and yellow letters anywhere, even where they’ve already been yellow. You can tell if somebody plays in hard mode if there is an asterisk after the game number in their post. Many of us (including me) play by self-imposed rules that I termed “super hard mode.” I do not let myself replay any black letters, I must replay green letters in position, and I must replay yellow letters but I have to move them to a spot where they haven’t been yellow. Regular hard mode does not enforce all of those restrictions.
Sometimes you find yourself in a spot where you’re down to one letter but it could be many possibilities. For example, let’s say you guess bound as your first guess and the B is black but everything else is green: _OUND. We here in this thread call that a trap. Possible solutions for that first letter include FHMPRSW. If you have enabled hard mode in settings, the game will force you to use ound in every subsequent guess, and since there are more than six possibilities you may very well lose. So while I do play my self-imposed super hard mode rules, in this situation I would then use what we in the thread call a “sleuth” word. For this example I might guess prams to check four of those consonants at once.
One simple strategy is to start out with two words that check 10 different letters. Doing so violates hard mode rules, but nobody here in the thread cares at all if other people do or do not play hard mode. An example similar to my strategy would start with plant score as the first two words. Note how RSTLNE are all checked, plus also AOCP, which are okayish in terms of high frequency letters.
What I do is start with plant, then obeying super hard mode rules try to guess as close to score with my second guess as possible. A couple people start with slant, which is technically better, but I prefer plant because s is too common for me. Every hit in my first word I require myself to use in the second, meaning that’s one less letter I can check if an S shows up.
One last thing to point out is that Wordle does not repeat answers. That means if an answer has ever shown up before, it is not going to be the answer now. Here is a list of all previous answers, updated each day: Past Wordle answers: Archive of previous words | Rock Paper Shotgun
That makes two optional elements of difficulty you can choose to avail yourself of or not. You can either play hard mode (officially in app or just self-imposed) and/or you can refer to the previous answers list. Many (most?) of us feel like one or the other is cheating, and wouldn’t do it ourselves. But we don’t care if others do, and it’s rare for somebody to both play in hard mode and not check previous answers. Most of us either check previous answers or don’t play in hard mode. I play self-imposed super hard mode but I do check previous answers, for example.
Welcome to the thread!
EDIT: Another opening strategy I meant to mention but forgot is to check four vowels with your first word, and/or check all five vowels in your first two words. Words like audio are nice for the former, and words like orate are good for the latter. I personally go consonant-heavy with plant as my opener for the same reason I don’t go with slant: vowels are very common, and any letter I hit in my first word is one less letter I can check with my second.
Wordle 934 5/6
HEART
BONER
MINER
FINER
LINER
FYI - audio has been used! Thanks for the link, BTW. I didn’t know where it was.
Here’s a few thoughts about a first word, and following it up:
- Like Ellis, I’m a consonant-heavy guy. There are a few reasons for this:
a) Consonants are the bones of the word, they define its shape. Vowels fill in the spaces in between. If you’ve ever seen Hebrew text, all those letters you see are consonants. The reader mentally fills in the vowels. You can’t always do that with English, but you can most of the time.
b) There are only six vowels (counting Y, which is almost always a vowel in Wordle). You’re going to have to use one or two of them in each word anyway. But you’ll need to start knocking off the most frequent consonants.
Even in my consonant-heavy approach, my usual first two words (SLANT/CHORE) hit the three most frequent vowels. They also hit the 7 most frequent consonants.
c) It’s easier to fill in missing vowels once you know the consonants, than the other way around. (See (a).)
d) Traps. Traps are always about too many consonants to choose between. So start reducing the number of unchecked consonants early and often, especially those consonants that work and play well with other consonants. L,N,R,S,T have been mentioned; also C,H. If the blank in your trap is adjacent to a consonant, it won’t be a very big trap. - Positioning. No letters are evenly distributed across the five positions of Wordle solutions. If your opening word or words have their letters in the places where they most frequently appear, you get more greens, and green is good. (h/t Gordon Gekko.
) S has been the first letter of 130 solutions; second place is C which has been the first letter of 85 solutions. It won’t surprise anyone to find that E is the most frequent last letter by a good margin. After that, you can do your own research, as they say. - For your second word, a good question (and one I won’t even pretend that there’s a definitive answer to) is how much emphasis to put on finding more letters, and how much to put on placing the letters that were yellow in your first word.
For me, the usual divider is between having found 2 and 3 letters in my starting word: 3 or more, I’m going to shape my choice of second word around what I already know; the fewer missing letters, the less likely that I’ll find any of them with a second word of entirely new letters. (It helps that, given my starting word, 3 letters means at least 2 consonants.)
However, hitting 3+ letters on the opening word is infrequent, hence my having a regular second word. IME, the vast majority of the time I have 2 yellows, I narrow things down a lot more with my regular second word than by giving up two of those five new letters to place the two yellows from the first word. But if I’ve got two consonants from my starting word, and one or both are green, that’s going to already be shaping the solution. At that point, I’ll be making lists of possible solutions, and choosing a second word that narrows the field of those specific words the most.
But that’s what works for me, given my starting word and usual second word. This is more of an art than a science.
Great way to put it. That’s exactly why I go consonant heavy but didn’t have the words to express why.
Thanks! 
Caught a break today and chose wisely.
Wordle 934 3/6*
IRATE
RELIC
LINER
Wordle 934 2/6*
SLATE
LINER
Woo-hoo! And the bot ranked me at 99 for skill too.
Wordle 934 3/6
SLATE
CHOIR
LINER
Wordle 935 3/6
RATIO
TRUCE
THREW