Maybe the last thing the world needs right now is someone else writing about the best way to do the word puzzle, Wordle.

Wordle is a simple word guessing game. You have to guess a five-letter word in six attempts.

I have become annoyed about the number of people posting about Wordle, especially on TikTok. I think most of them are entertaining, but not actually all that good at Wordle and I think many of them give bad examples and inaccurate advice.

I do not claim to be a world champion, but here are my statistics for all the official games of Wurdle I have ever played:

If you get the answer on the first or second try that is almost 100% luck. If you get it on the third or fourth try, that represents skill. I suggest that the standard way of rating Wordle players should be the percentage of Wordles they solve in their first four guesses.

So, what is my method?

I almost always start with the words IRATE and SOUND. This covers the five vowels and 10 of the 11 most common letters in five-letter words. In the past, I used ADIEU, as it contains four vowels, but D is not a very common consonant. I have also used to use CLOUD as my second word, after IRATE, as I figured it would always be easy to use a plural word to test for an “S” later, but really “S” is so common it needs to be in the first two words.

For those who have not played, the green “E” means that there is an “E” in that location. The orange “R” and “U” mean that the word contains those letters but not in the locations where I placed them. All the other letters I guessed are not in the answer word.

It is rare for these two lines to give enough information for a good guess for the third line. I consider a “good guess” to be one where there are only two, or, at the most, three words that could possibly fit the information available.

For the third line, there is no point in choosing a word with “E” at the end. We already know that is correct, so we can use that spot to test another letter. So we want to find a word that has an “R” in a space other than second, a “U” in a space other than third, and some common letters we have not tried so far. What counts as a common letter? This list and graph can tell us:

Common letters in 5-letter words in order: A E S O R I L T N U D C Y M P H B

So, what word do you think you would try next?

Guessing LURCH helps define the location of the U” and “R”, the two letters we know are in the word somewhere. It also tests “L”, “C” and “H”, the 7th, 11th and 16th most common letters.

It did not help very much. The good news is that we know “U” is the second letter and that “R” must now be the first or fourth letter, but we did not gain any new letters. After attempting 13 different letters I only got three hits. This low success rate makes me think that one of the correct letters occurs more than once.

I could not think of any words that would end with U X R E (where “X” is an unknown letter). This made me think that the “R” was probably the first letter. So the word would be R U X X E. Two consonants between the vowels seemed unlikely so I considered the word could end in a double “E”. The only word that came to mind was RUPEE, the Indian currency. I was far from certain, but it fitted with what I knew, tested one new letter and would decide if there was more than one “E”, so it seemed with guessing.

I was quite relieved to find out that RUPEE was the correct answer!

A few extra tips:

Remember that Wordle uses American spelling: HONOR, COLOR and so on.

The correct answer will never be a simple plural such as BOATS. However, you can use BOATS or other plural words to test if there is an “S” in the answer word.

The New York Times will not use words that may offend some Americans, such as “SLAVE” or “LYNCH”

Here are a couple more examples of my method in action:

After the first two lines I knew that the word contained “R”, “T”, “O” and “N”, but none were in the places I guessed. Sounding out letter combinations “ORN” seemed a good possible combination to end the word. With only one vowel, it seemed wise to put it in the middle. Putting “TH” first seemed logical. It used all the letters I needed to use, in places where they might be correctly placed, and tested one new letter. This turned out to be correct, but even if it had not been it would have been very helpful in deciding where each of the known letters should go.

The first two words told me that there was an “I” somewhere other than first place and a “D” at the end. So I guessed “CHIMP”. If “I” is the only vowel it should go in the middle, and this word tests four new and fairly common letters. None of the new letters helped, and the “I” was not in the middle. I had tried 14 different letters and only got two hits, making me think that there must be duplicated letters. I needed another vowel sound so the options were trying “Y” or adding a second “I”. Going for “I” as the second and fourth letter, with “D” at the end made me guess “LIVID”. The “L” was wrong, but the rest was correct. After that, the only option was to assume that there were two “V”s and two “I”s! That is a bit mean of the New York Times!

You can only do the official “Wordle” once every day, but there is a non-official “Wordle Archive” that you can use to practice and test your strategies without interfering with your statistics. Here is an example of how not to “Wordle”!

The Wordle Archive looks a little different but the rules are the same. I got three letters in the correct places with my first guess. How many words can there be that are “XRAXE”, where “X” represents the unknown letters? I abandoned my system, hoping to guess the answer in two. Also, having found two vowels I did not want to use “SOUND” as my next word, as it seemed unlikely that there would be any more vowels in the answer. Each guess only tested two new letters, so it took a long time to get the right answer. If I had stuck to my system, I would have learned that there was a “D” in the word at the first or fourth position. I would not have guessed CRAZE, FRAME or BRAKE but gone straight to either DRAPE or GRADE and solved the Wordle in three or four lines.

Good luck!