- Hello!
Watch yours truly, David Kwong,
speak about daily games using words
which total five.
Okay, that was pretty terrible.
But I am here to teach you how you can win at Wordle
every single time.
My name is indeed David Kwong
and I am a New York Times crossroad puzzle constructor,
puzzle designer, and magician.
And if you've been on Twitter over the last couple of months
you have undoubtedly seen people post
their yellow and green squares.
And the game has been such a hit
that the New York Times just purchased it
to be part of their Games section.
And it's a very simple game.
Here's how it works.
You have to guess the keyword
using five letter guesses.
If you get a green square
that means your letter is correct
and it's in the right place.
If it's yellow, it's in there somewhere else.
Okay. Here are some tips
so you can crush it at Wordle.
(upbeat music)
There are two main strategies.
The first, get it in six and make sure you never buzz.
The second, guess it in as few turns as possible
so you can brag about it on Twitter.
But this is a little riskier
and you might buzz from time to time.
So strategy number one,
you don't care if you solve it in three or five guesses,
more information is better.
Let's say your first guess is rakes.
Guess a completely different word
to get more information, like Dingo.
Now you have more information.
In fact, knowing what letters are not in this secret word
is just as valuable.
So here, you might be able to work out
that the word is drown.
Strategy number two,
solve it in as few guesses as possible
so you can brag about it
in your ultra-competitive group text.
Hey! If you don't swing for the fences,
you'll never hit those home runs, right?
(people cheering)
Okay, so here's what you do.
Let's say you have A, I, N, T in green,
but is the word paint, saint, or taint?
You can try for one of them and if you hit it,
it's Wordle party time.
Using strategy number one,
you might guess pesto
to figure out what that missing letter is.
Now if you play on hard mode,
then you're forced to keep the letters that you get, right?
And the pesto strategy goes right out the window.
Whichever strategy you choose,
Guessing words that have a lot of common letters is key.
So you might start with beast, or siren, or laser.
I personally, I like doing stare
followed by doing and lucky.
That really helps me blanket the entire alphabet.
Just for fun, if you wanted to cover
20 of the 26 letters with four guesses,
you could do junks, whomp, calyx, and fritz.
Now some very smart people
have looked at the Wordle source code
and have analyzed the word list.
They've figured out that roate,
an obsolete variant of the word rote,
is the best word to start with.
And with perfect play
you can always find the secret word in five turns
if you start with roate.
Other top words are raise, raile,
an obsolete word meaning rail,
soare, a young hawk,
and ariel, a mermaid.
Just kidding.
It's an Arabian mountain gazelle or something like that.
What are all these crazy words?
Don't worry.
While these words are allowed as guesses,
they will never be the secret word
which only comes from a smaller list of common words
that were curated by the creator and his partner.
So more tips.
None of the secret words are plurals that end in S.
So if you've put out the letters A, C, E, L, S,
the answer is probably scale and not laces.
And probably not claes, a Scottish word for clothes.
Also, don't sleep on that Y as a vowel.
Psych, crypt, tryst,
but usually that Y is at the end of a word.
So you can party with money, honey.
Next, watch out for duplicate letters.
Abbey, llama, robot.
One of these days, we're gonna get kayak or geese.
And when the word is mamma,
a lot of people's heads are gonna explode.
Also, Wordle is a social game.
So if you see a lot of people posting
gray squares in their first guess,
maybe you start with your first word
having less common letters.
Skip the bread and go straight to the gumbo.
Overall, just have fun.
I start with stare every morning and it is boring.
Mix it up with words likely glyph, or psalm,
or your favorite South American relative of the raccoon,
the coati.
And now I'm gonna call up
three of my friends here from Buzzfeed
to use these strategies
to see if they can take down Wordle.
- So, we'll start with the top strategy word.
- Yeah. Let's go with this statistically
the top word to use, which is roate.
Or I've never used it before,
- [Woman In Gray] Me neither. but I feel like
it's gonna be really good.
- Oh! - Wow.
- Okay. - Okay.
- [Man] Right, the O and the T's not there.
I'm thinking maybe T is at the front of the word?
- [Woman In Green] Yeah.
- So, how about stove?
S-T-O-V-E. - Stove or stole?
- [Woman In Green] Okay. Let's try as well.
- [Man] All right, stole.
Here we go.
- [Woman In Gray] Oh, so close.
Those. T-H-O-S-E. - Those.
- How about that? - It's gotta be those.
- Yeah! - Oh my God.
I hope we get it on the third try.
- [Man] It's gotta be those.
(all gasp) (speaking in unison)
- I'm so happy we got this on a third try.
- Is this the best one you've ever done?
- [Woman In Gray] It's the first time I've got
it on the third try.
- [Man] Wow. - [Woman In Green] Teamwork.
- This is awesome.
- Literally the best one you've ever done.
- Hope you enjoyed these tips and happy Wordling.
I bid you adieu, adios, aloha,
and later gator.
Peace.
(light upbeat music)