Wordle — the game you should play everyday

The Covid pandemic and Josh Wardle gave birth to a very interesting love child — Wordle.

For those who still don’t know Wordle, the game you should be playing everyday, is a very straightforward, yet just testing enough daily word-guessing game.

Wordle has a very simple premise. You need to guess a five-letter word in a maximum of six guesses. Each word guess must be an actual dictionary-entry word. Once a word is guessed, if it contains any letters that the word you are looking for contains, the given letter tile appears highlighted in a mustard yellow. If the word you guess contains any letters from the word you are looking for and in the correct position, the letter tile appears highlighted in a satisfying bright green. Once you have guessed the right word, all given letter tiles will appear in that satisfying bright green.

Wordle instructions - how to play

In this article, I want to explain why we should play Wordle everyday. This applies just as well if English is your first language, or you’re a foreign English speaker. Also, Wordle is a great game for teachers to play with their language students, or just as a general warm-up exercise with a group, say before an English class.

The love-child story

First let’s quickly do justice to the unusual origin story of Wordle.

Josh Wardle a Welsh software engineer, had been developing a prototype of Wordle during his time with Reddit and Pinterest, a decade before the pandemic struck. It was the pandemic and Wardle’s regular playing of the New York Times’ spelling bee and crossword, that gave the divine inspiration to modify the game to its current form. The game turned out to be so popular, that it gathered millions of daily players, and eventually attracted the attention of the New York Times, who bought the game for an undisclosed low seven-figure sum.

The astonishing benefits

I’ve encouraged children as young ten, learning English as a foreign language, to start playing this game. What I’ve seen has been quite extraordinary. Over many months, often a year or two years, of playing the game, a minimum of once a week, those children have not only improved their comprehension of common five letter words, but also unusual and obscure five-letter words. This has given them a huge boost in confidence. It has demonstrated that their grasp of uncommon words is neither impossible nor pointless.

Very often the unusual words we learn, coincidentally appear in completely unrelated contexts say a text we are reading, or a game we are discussing. This reinforces that language is all around us, highly contextual, and not simply something that lives in, and is learnt from, sterile textbooks or classroom exercises.

Given time, the effects have been so extraordinary that my young students around 13 and 14 begin to beat me in head to heads. I’m no slouch in the game either, and regularly solve in well under a minute, so this is an impressive feat. And to add insult to my injury, these young children are learning English as their second language — simply, chapeau!

But then my underlying philosophy is that the role of the teacher is to educate others to surpass the knowledge and accomplishments of said teacher. I express this idea quite simply by telling people, it would be a rather perverse concept of teaching, if the role of the teacher were to guide students to be just a little less smarter and intelligent than the teacher. Put like that, the only logical conclusion in my eyes, is that the teacher must guide students to achieving the degree of intelligence that they are most capable of, irrespective of whether it surpasses or fails to surpass that of the teacher. I for one feel a warm fuzzy feeling anytime my students outdo me in their reasoning, mental gymnastics, or creativity. It means I have prepared them for life. You can read more about this in my upcoming article - Smarter than the teacher)

Word mastery and letter logic

My primary argument for why you should be playing Wordle everyday is the fact that it develops your word mastery and word logic in English.

Word mastery is the idea that that we understand how words behave in a given language, the structure they have, the composition of prefixes and suffixes, and what repeating pattern of letters are common to a given language, and how this may relate etymologically to root languages. For English these are predominantly old-Germanic, ancient Greek, and Latin root words.

When we couple this to letter logic, the way that certain letters can, or cannot, combine to form words in a language, we really unlock our word mastery.

Algorithmic thinking

To develop word mastery and letter logic, I argue that practicing a form of mental algorithmic thinking is the key. This sounds very fancy and complicated, but in short it’s a mental visualisation ability, where we visualise the combination of letters in a possible word. This enables us to determine if two letters can go together given the possible structure of a word, based on letters revealed, or on letters remaining available to use. Remember, Wordle eliminates letters once they have been used and they are not present in the word we are trying to guess. Though the letters can still be used, if we so require. This mental algorithmic operation is something I’ve seen all my younger students get extremely proficient in, so I can’t endorse it enough.

Game strategies

My game strategy adivce to get good at Wordle is to use random association words to get you started. Such randomisation is one of the best strategies for beating the odds of which word could occur on a given day. So say I'm feeling tired today I type 'TIRED' to begin. Or it maybe 'ANGRY', 'HAPPY', or 'SLEEP'. You get the idea. Often these associative guesses give me a good start and fast solve.

One day I almost got a first-guess solve thanks to this. I can't remember what the word was now, but I had a random word in mind connected to something that day, I thought of using it in a head to head with a student, but at the last minute I prevaricated and opted for a new word. And, guess what, if I hadn't, I would have got my first and only first-guess solve.

Another starting straregy is to eliminate vowels first, so you could use a word like 'AEGIS', followed by 'LOTUS'. This way you eliminate all the vowels. This is a logically sound stratefy for English words, as English words must contain a least one vowel, and often they contain two or more.

Letter repetition can be a good strategy to get over a guessing block. So even though you've used a letter in a previous word and it has been eliminated, it sometimes proves to be easier repeating that letter in a new word guess, rather than endlessly pondering over a guess that doesn't repeat any letters. Often repeating letters in guesses, counterintuitively helps me to a quicker solve.

Understanding letter logic

To understand letter logic better, we can take a few definite examples, explained by way of some easy to remember principles.

1. First-letter logic: this is the simple idea of computing and eliminating which letter can or cannot follow the first letter of a given word, so say we have the letter ’T’, it’s clear that ‘TX’, ‘TW’, ’TY’, ’TM’, ’TC’, hardly occur in English as word openers, while ‘TH’, ‘TR’, ’TA’, ‘TO’, ‘TU’, all do but with varying degrees of frequency.

2. Second-letter logic: this is not much different to first-letter logic, but this time, we must compute backwards. Say if a second letter is revealed green, then we can try to compute what is likely to precede that letter, and we can couple this to the idea of common five-letter word prefixes, so say given ’N’ as a second letter the prefix ‘UN’, is very common in English, or given the letter ‘H’, the prefixes ‘CH’, or ‘SH’, are also high frequency.

3. Mid-word logic: this is all about which letters can or cannot commonly occur in the middle of a five-letter word. For instance, consonants alone are not so common, accept in some words like ‘AORTA’, ‘ORDER’, or ‘PYGMY’. While double vowels are ‘OO’, ‘EE’, or ‘OU’, as in ‘’SHOOT’, SLEET’, or ‘PROUD’, are very common in English, yet hardly ever occur in other languages, say Polish.

4. End-word logic: here we see the most common suffix structures for English words, for instance ‘ER’, ‘LY’, or ’ES’, as in ‘FRYER’, ‘APTLY’, or ‘LIKES’. Again the principle never changes, the idea is to perform a mental algorithmic operation of letter logic so as to identify the possible word structure.

5. Common five-letter words: the idea here is simply entering common five-letter words to either eliminate vowels, or to eliminate letters. These are usually good at the beginning of the game, say ‘IDEAS’, ‘PRIOR’, or ‘AEGIS’.

The examples I’ve iterated are not meant to be exhaustive, but simply demonstrative. With practice, care, and attention to detail, you or your students will be able to arrive at similar letter patterns, and make them part of your letter logic arsenal in solving a given Wordle.

Late game strategies

Let’s say you are four words in, with only two guesses remaining, quite a few letters on the board, as you have repeated letters in your word guess. This can happen at times, when your brain juices are running low, and you’re not at your most creative.

In these moments, if there are a few too many letters left up on the board, the best bet to get you over the finish line with a successful solve is to use as many remaining letters without repetition, and hope and pray, this brings a letter out of a given word. By doing this, it can increase the chances that the last guess will hit the mark.

But what is more usual is that after practice, as your word mastery increases, you will be able to look at a jumble of letters, and algorithmically work out, what the likely word is supposed to be. This becomes easier and easier the more you play the game.

A few last words

Playing Wordle everyday in my view is the fastest way to see results in your, or your students’, word mastery and letter logic. These benefits will carry over to your word mastery and letter logic in general in English, as some of the principles that work in five-letter words, also occur in longer words. I encourage my students to dictionary reference new and unfamiliar words, not to miss those teachable moments of course, and sometimes I use the given word in its most common context, or explain some interesting reference to the word when it’s applicable to aid memorisation.

As I mentioned earlier, and must emphasise again, the improvement in vocabulary, word mastery, and letter logic that I have witnessed in my own students, is something that makes me very grateful to the inventor of this game. I can honestly say my students genuinely enjoy playing Wordle, and even more they enjoy the constructive competitiveness (check out my upcoming article Always compete never cheat) that we approach the game with, knowing that they must pip me to the line, or completely demolish me.

Early on students find it demoralising and hard to imagine that they may accomplish such a feat, given that it feels impossible to guess a random word, whose meaning most likely is alien to them, and in a language which isn’t their own.

But with encouragement and a total lack of judgment or diminution, a student can go well beyond their own expectations. I call this the power of compassionate authority. Sometimes we need an unbending guide to lead us into waters where we would never usually venture, at least without confidence.

So happy solving, and good luck getting a first-word solve!