Wordle, April 21, 2024

I did not solve Wordle 1,037. I fell into the too-many-alternatives trap.

I’m interested in how accurate my fourth guess (“wooly”) was, and in how many alternatives I had for my fifth guess.

Here is a way to find the words that I could have guessed for my fourth guess:

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep -E '^[^cranemudtis]o[^cranemudtis]l[^cranemudtis]$'

That regular expression finds 9 words could have been my fourth guess:

folly
golly
holly
holly
jolly
jowly
lolly
lowly
polly
woolf

If I don’t know the answer is “jolly”, what would be my best guess here? Columns 1, 3 and 5 are unknown.

Column 5 is easy: “woolf” probably isn’t in the Official Wordle Word List, so ‘y’ is the only letter for column 5.

Letters for column 1 and their frequency:

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep -E '^[^cranemudtis]o[^cranemudtis]l[^cranemudtis]$' |
sort | uniq | cut -c1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1.1n

That gives me these letters and counts for column 1:

      1 f
      1 g
      1 h
      1 p
      1 w
      2 j
      2 l

Clearly a word with ’l’ or ‘j’ in column 1. “jolly”, “jowly”, “lolly”, “lowly” all have initial ’l’ or ‘j’.

A similar script for column 3 yeilds:

      1 o
      2 w
      6 l

The potential answer words beginning with ’l’ or ‘j’ don’t have an ‘o’ in column 3, so a program doing this puzzle would pick an ’l’ for column 3’. That gives potential answers of “jolly” and “lolly” as the best, at least in terms of either guessing correctly, or eliminating more of the potential answer words.

But I chose “wooly”.

After “wooly”, this regular expression says that six words could potentially solve the puzzle:

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep -E '^[^cranemudtiswo]o[^cranemudtiswo]ly$'

I only had 2 guesses left at that point, although I probably would not arrive at “lolly” without more help, as I speak US English.

folly
golly
holly
jolly
lolly
polly

After “wooly” failed me, all the potential answers end in “olly”. All six have different letters in column 1. In my mind, the choice at this point comes down to letter frequence in English.

“holly” begins with an ‘h’ which is a high-frequency letter in English. After that, all choices are about the same. ‘j’ as an initial letter is fairly low frequency.

Not a great showing, but not inexcusable, either.