Has your Twitter feed become full of people sharing green and yellow square emojis? That’s people sharing their Wordle scores. If you want to win the game in fewer goes than your friends and followers, try these five-letter words to check your vowels.
Wordle is a daily puzzle game where users have six guesses to reveal a hidden five-letter word.
With each go, letters that appear in the word but are in the wrong place turn yellow, whereas letters that appear in the word and are in the right place turn green.
There is only one Wordle puzzle a day, so everyone who plays on that day is guessing the same word, adding a competitive element to how quickly you can get a row of green tiles.
The daily limit on your Wordle puzzle also prevents you from losing hours to another online game.
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You can then show off your score on social media by clicking the share button, which generates the coloured square emojis pattern, revealing how many guesses it took you to guess today’s word.
When it comes to improving your Wordle scores, there are different tactics you can use to try and guess the day’s word faster.
For example, we know just about every five-letter word will contain at least one vowel (an exception could be ‘flyby’ although the letter y is considered a semi-vowel by many).
So statistically speaking, by using a word containing lots of vowels, you’re likely to uncover at least one of the letters in today’s word.
URAEI: this word is a plural of uraeus, which means the representation of the sacred Asp serpent in Ancient Egyptian art
MIAOU – one way of translating the noise cats make – is accepted by Wordle and contains four vowels.
LOUIE – this is commonly known as a name which isn’t accepted in Wordle or Scrabble, however Louie has another meaning: an abbreviation of lieutenant, making the word an acceptable answer in Wordle.
OURIE – traditionally a Scottish word, this can mean depressing and dismal, or shivering with cold depending on the context.
After you’ve checked off the vowels, you can move on to other common letters.
Using common letters makes your guesses more statistically likely to reveal the letters of the word, however Wordle can throw curve balls and use rarer words.
Also, don’t forget: Wordle uses US English, as many Britons found out a few weeks ago when they failed to guess ‘Favor’.
Wordle also can use the same letter twice, so just because a letter has turned green in one position, doesn’t mean it won’t only appear once in the word.
So, after you’ve tried your vowels using one of the words above, you might find adding in some of the most commonly-used letters will help guess the word.
Analysis of the Concise Oxford Dictionary by Lexico.com found the 10 most used letters are:
1 – E
2 – A
3 – R
4 – I
5 – O
6 – T
7 – N
8 – S
9 – L
10 – C
Strong five-letter words by this analysis include: CRIES, ENACT, LATIN, IRONS, NICER, ONSET, RAISE, SLANT and TIERS.