Letter frequency is the key ingredient of a good opener, but it is surprisingly ignored. The famous ETAOIN SHRDLU order reflects frequency of the letters in English and is highly influenced by such frequent words as the, of, to and and. Frequency of letters in five-letter words is quite different, and if you want to choose an appropriate word game, you should not rely on statistics.
The frequency of letters in the set of common English five-letter words is presented in the following table.</ p>
Further down the list are W, V, Z, X, J and Q, which are so rare that they are not worth even as guesses.
The purpose of the first guess is elimination. Elimination is determined by the frequency of letters you choose. Word consisting of the most frequent eight or nine letters will exclude from the dictionary more combinations than the word consisting of the middle letters.
This is exactly the reason why CRANE, SLATE, CRATE, TRACE and STARE are included in any serious analysis. Just notice that CRANE contains C, R, A, N and E, four out of five letters mentioned above. SLATE contains S, L, A, T and E, all in the top eight.
This is exactly the reason why ADIEU performs so badly. It consists of A, E and I, which is good, but loses the rest of the letters to D and U, excluding R, S, T, L and N. After the first guess, you know nothing about those consonants, which distinguish words from each other.
There is one hidden information in the numbers. Letters are not evenly distributed between five positions.
This information transforms your single orange tile to a clue. Probability of S appearing in the third position is lower than in the first and fifth position, and placement in the third position ignores the clue.
Frequency tables don't say anything about repetition, and repetition is the cause of defeat in most cases. Such words as SPEED, GLASS, MELEE, ERROR and LLAMA break the pattern created by players because orange tile doesn't say how many times a letter repeats.
E, S, L, O and T repeat in five-letter words. If you are left with two or three options and none of them works, the case of double letter is the most probable.
Just reading the frequency table makes no sense. Players don't calculate the probabilities of letters during the game, and people who seem to be using math just use the patterns that they have seen hundred times.
To achieve this level, you need volume, which you cannot get from a daily puzzle. Playing unlimited rounds at wordleunlimited.dev will allow you to face these distributions so many times that they will become facts and transform into reflexes. Playing with different lengths of words is also a good idea. The order of frequencies is different for six and seven-letter words because of additional vowels and suffixes such as ING, ION, NESS. Opener, optimized for five-letter words, may not work for seven-letter ones, and playing both is the quickest way to see the difference.
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