One of the most basic games to emerge as a trending item from the holiday season is Wordle. The application first saw a rise in popularity when people started sharing results on social media, specifically Twitter.
Since then, many vocabularians have taken to guessing the correct words just so they can show they’re better at words than anyone else. If you haven’t tried it as yet, read on to see what it’s about and our tips to succeed at Wordle.
What is Wordle?
Technically, a Wordle is a text cloud with words of varying sizes displayed in a space in a way that human sight can consume them within a matter of seconds. The principle is that the word’s size or the number of letters is proportionate to how many times you’ll see it appear.
Josh Wardle decided to make a game out of it, with you needing to guess a five-letter word within six rows. Each row represents one guess, after which you’ll receive clues as to which letters were correct and incorrect. Wordle is browser-based, and you’ll only receive one word per day.
How to make a Wordle
The premise of Wordle is based on receiving one word you need to guess on your browser. You’ll click on five letters to make a word in the first row. When you’re done, the game will let you know how many letters are right in the correct spaces:
- Green: right letter in the correct space;
- Yellow: right letter in the incorrect space;
- Grey: wrong letter in the incorrect space.
By using these visual clues, you need to rearrange and use other letters until you find the word for the day. If you win, you can immediately share the results. The browser copies the image to the clipboard, and then you can head over to platforms like Twitter to paste it.
Tips to succeed at Wordle
Now that you have the idea of the concept, here are a few tips for how to succeed at Wordle.
Choose a few vowels
Firstly, focus on a word that has a few good vowels. If you want to be brave, you can use a word like ‘adieu’ to maximize the potential for unlocking as many as possible. It leads the way towards the next tip, where you can just focus on consonants.
Work in some consonant
If the first tip worked, you should see some yellow or green blocks. Add some consonants to the mix now, and make sure you test ‘y’ early to remove it as an option. Use the vowels you discovered in the first tip to see if you can work out which consonants will work the best.
Pay attention to succeeded and failed letters
It’s all up to you now. Reuse green letters in the same spaces, and rearrange the yellow ones, until you can mentally work out what the five-letter Wordle of the day is. Don’t waste turns, as you only have six. Try to determine what it is in your mind first before you place an entry.
Cheating at Wordle
If you’ve seen Twitterer getting it right on the first try for days in a row, the chances are that they’ve been cheating. While we don’t advocate these methods or any form of cheating, it is possible and worth sharing. We hope you never have to go this far to win at Wordle.
See what others do
The most obvious way to cheat at Wordle is to simply check your social media feed, especially Twitter. Most gamers will use the tag “#wordle”, so winners will be easy to find. Since everyone needs to guess the same word for the day, you can copy their word in one try.
Incognito browser
Another way to cheat at Wordle is to open your browser in Incognito mode. The game won’t be able to detect that you’ve already played it, so you can make as many guesses as you want. When you finally find the word, open your browser in normal mode and do it on the first try.
Source code
Finally, finding the Wordle of the day can be as easy as inspecting the JavaScript file that the programmer used to design the game. The word of the day is listed in the file, so you simply need to insert it on your first try.
How good is your vocabulary?
So, there you have it, our tips to succeed at Wordle. We’re not sure how long it will remain a trending game in 2022 or if it will become more advanced. What we do know is that it’s fun for word aficionados like ourselves to play it properly without cheating. Let us know if you’ve been playing it and what your experience is thus far.