On Wordle starting words and going with the flow
As daily routines go, it’s hard to beat Wordle. It’s just challenging enough that I’m not guaranteed to solve it every day, not so challenging that I can’t do it before I’ve had my morning coffee. On top of the personal sense of fulfillment I get from “winning,” there’s also a social aspect to Wordle—like many families, I imagine, my family has a group chat where aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings share daily results from sunny southern California to snowy Denver.1
Over time, my Wordle strategy has changed. When I first started playing, I began each round with the word MOIST until one day, miraculously, I saw five green tiles flip over on my very first input. That word being presumably out of play, now, I pivoted to different starting words each day, to varying results.
Then came the Wordle hybrid and spin-off games, like Heardle, Framed, Quordle2, and the “cursed child” of the group: Duotrigordle3. Wordle lost its luster as the “boring original,” and there came a time when I—gasp!—didn’t play the Wordle for several months, except for random days here and there. I’ll put in a plug for my favorite of the Daily Word Game pantheon: NYT’s Spelling Bee, where you have to make as many words as you can given seven letters, one of which must be used in each word you create. As an added challenge, there is one pangram each day which uses all seven letters at least once—I would usually try to play until I got this one.
Because of the family group text, I’m now back on the Wordle train, which means I needed a new strategy for a new era. For the first few days, I tried a gambit that hearkened back to the Quordle days: start each day with RAISE and MOUTH, a strategy first introduced to me by Jackson to guarantee all4 vowels and many high-value consonants. By using this strategy, you preclude yourself from getting it in two, but you set yourself up for a possible slam-dunk on the third word.
Except it didn’t.
Most days, the RAISE/MOUTH strategy left me with maybe a yellow letter here, maybe a stray green there, but hardly anything that set me up in a good position for a third guess. It’s an excellent Quordle play, where you have many more guesses at your disposal, but it didn’t translate well. Since I think of Wordle in golf terms (four is a par, three is a birdie, etc.), RAISE/MOUTH was akin to hitting a drive several yards off the fairway and punching back in from the rough, leaving no chance at a birdie and an outside look at par. It was time to pivot again.
From there, I returned to a familiar strategy: start with the same word every day, only this time it wouldn’t be MOIST. This was fine, and yielded better results than RAISE/MOUTH, but Whitney eventually caught on, and when she saw my result blocks in the family chat, she essentially had a free word based on looking at how my first word did. Feeling exploited and used, I abandoned that word (which I honestly cannot even remember) and began yet another procedure, the one I’m still using today.
In the spirit of being open to experience this year, and going where life takes me, I am using starting words that relate to what’s happening in my life. This morning, as I gulped down my wake-up water, I used WATER. Yesterday, after watching a Kurzgesagt video on hypothetical alien warfare, I used ALIEN—and got it in two! On days that I golf I use EAGLE (to give me good vibes for the upcoming round, which never materialize). This strategy doesn’t always help me score, but it is fun to connect Wordle to my daily experience, to give each starting word a sense of meaning.
I’m trying to let life influence life in other ways, too: if I hear a song I like in a coffee shop, that’ll be the next album I listen to. If I read a book about far-future space travel, I want to watch videos on advanced physics to try to wrap my head around mind-boggling technology. If I see a car with a license plate from a state where a friend lives, I want to call them and see how they’re doing. Going into the day with a plan is great, and goals are vital for my sense of purpose, but trusting that the day will also take me where I need to go is also essential, and I want to go with that flow more often.
Best of luck in your Wordle game today.
-Kurt
We also play the New York Times’ Connections puzzle every day, which is much less of a guarantee.
Merriam-Webster owns Quordle now?! I guess dictionaries are now in the big-tech-acquisition game. Love it.
Anybody want to put an offer in on this one? OED? dictionary.com?
I see you, Y