People who start their Wordle with a vowely word like audio or alien are wrong

[AngelaBeverage]

Okay, so you've found out that your word has vowels. Well done. That narrows it down to just about every word.

I think a much better strategy is to start with lots of consonants, and especially consonants that can be used in consonant blends (like R or L) or digraphs (like C or H).

Vowels are less useful than consonants.

Yes, but it's more likely that you'll eliminate a letter, and knowing that the word you want doesn't have a P in it is of much less value than knowing it doesn't have an E in it.

I think what people are missing is that:

-the process of elimination is much more efficient for vowels
-all words contain vowels so it is easy to rotate them between words.

so say you start with CRATE. There’s a good chance you’ll get a match A or E as those are common letters (and in common positionings).

But if you get nothing, you could try SPOIL next - which will eliminate the next two most common vowels (in common positionings) and another three common consonants.

Still nothing? Maybe FUNKY for the U and Y.

Yep. I tend to start with either AROSE or SOARE (it's a young hawk, apparently, though it somehow feels like cheating/not a 'proper' word), followed by UNITY, so all six vowels* are covered along with a sprinkling of common consonants.

*Yeah, six. I'm counting Y.

Started with ALIEN, as usual, got it in two today.

I always start with IRATE and usually get it in 3 or 4. When playing Quordle/Octordle/Sedecordle, I start with IRATE, then POUCH, then SLING. These serve me well 😃

It's a huge amount of luck - there are two groups of acceptable words but one group can never be the solution.

Eg - you can enter the word 'gorse' & it will accept it. However 'gorse' can never be the answer cos it's in the wrong database.

I stopped playing cos of this, I never used throwaway words & played on hard-mode to make it as difficult as possible. Yes, this is fun to me lol. So finding that out ruined how I thought I was playing & means there much much more luck involved than it appears - which I don't want.

(edited to add - I play squareword.org instead now. I put my first word in & then try (try! Lol) to pre-solve it from there without entering anything else. I'm running a 7.15 average over 1041 games, it's much more challenging. I've taken to asking my kids for my starter word & they are spiteful buggers & give me things with p's & k's in 😂)

So do I - was the day you solved it in 2 the day the word was FOLIO?

FINALLY SOMEONE WHO AGREES WITH ME! 🙏

the other day was when it was Curio

I wouldn't describe people as "wrong" for playing the way they want to play. But if somebody insisted that words like ADIEU etc were optimal because of the number of vowels, I wouldn't agree with them. I try to go for words with one vowel and four middle ranked (in terms of commonality) consonants. WRECK, BADLY, FIGHT etc.

I get pretty long streaks and 4/5 guess solutions are more or less joint most common. 3/6 are also about equal. So I guess my average is about 4.5 guesses.

I always start with chest, then usually do audio for the second guess unless I get enough right in chest to make a proper guess.