Sharing Wordle scores is a great way to nurture our human connections – really!

Well, at least it is for our family. I admit I expended a not insignificant amount of brain power earlier today trying to come up with a Wordle equivalent of “The family that prays together, stays together”, but I just couldn’t make a word that rhymes with Wordle work. A family that Wordles together, hurdles/girdles/turtles/encircles together? I gave up trying … for now!

Our immediate family members (parents and 2 grown sons living elsewhere, with busy families and busy lives) have been sharing our Wordle scores by text every morning for a considerable amount of time now, and I have to say that it really does feel like we’re doing it together. It’s a really, really nice way to start the day, to hear the ping of the text coming in from each son – and my husband in another room, each announcing his Wordle success … or semi-success. We even occasionally share some other news besides our scores, but you wouldn’t want too much communication first thing in the morning, now, would you?! At any rate, I highly recommend giving this easy way of interacting with others in your family or friend-family a try. Here’s an example of how very quick our exchanges are, but they provide a surprisingly strong feeling of connectedness. ❤

What made me think of this topic was the first story in the New York Times ‘This Morning’ email that comes to subscribers. The lead for their morning email was: Good morning. We’re covering lessons from the past year of Wordle — as well as Israeli hostages, Donald Trump and “Sailor Moon.” If putting Wordle ahead of the Israeli hostages and Trump doesn’t put things in perspective, I don’t know what does! Wow!! Once you get past the prioritizing of their news items, the lessons from their Wordle study are quite interesting … if you’re into Wordle. And, of course, if you’re not, you should be! To clarify, millions upon millions of people play Wordle every day.  Someone with time on their hands was tasked with analyzing the success rate of – get this – half a billion Wordle games, in fact, 515,000,000 Wordle games from this past year, and compare their results to Wordle’s bot expert – Wordlebot. The full story, by Josh Katz and Aatish Bhatia, can be found at the New York Times story:  Wordlebot year in review. Here are the lessons that emerged:

Lesson #1: Of the top 30 starting words, ADIEU is the most popular but least efficient. I love this one. Everyone who plays Wordle has a theory on what the first starting word show be, and ADIEU is certainly mentioned often with reverence. Sorry, folks! Here’s a chart of some of the most popular starting words and how successful they are and aren’t, according to this Times study.

Lesson #2: People like holiday words for starting words, like PARTY, HEART, BUNNY, and GHOST. For example, on Christmas day, MERRY, GIFTS, and PEACE were very popular this past year. At Thanksgiving, THANKS and GRAVY were popular starting words. I don’t think it helped them, but they were having fun … or they were desperate!

Lesson #3: More people solve Wordle on their first guess than can be explained by chance. I’ve clearly missed out on that phenomenon. I did get it in one try once, but that’s because my first word is always PARTY, and the word that day was PARTY. Once I got it in 2 because the second word I always use, NOISE, was the word of the day. For some reason, when there’s no guessing involved (with serious mental strategy involved, of course!) it’s not as satisfying.

Lesson #4: SLATE is on the rise as a starting word, while CRANE has fallen in popularity.

Lesson #5: The most difficult words to guess often start with J and/or end with Y. Words with double letters in them are also more of a struggle than others. The section below from the article shows the 5 words this past year that gave people the most trouble. I remember how challenging I found  JAZZY and NANNY very well indeed, although not as challenging as SASSY. Their guess rates in the high 5s are telling, given that you only get 6 guesses to find the solution. Yikes!

Lesson #6: The words that most surprised the bot included ANODE and MATEY.

Lesson #7: The bot (Wordlebot) is learning from your guesses. This is really worth analyzing regularly. Bots do what we used to call machine learning and is now called AI (artificial intelligence). The Wordlebot doesn’t do anything to change what you do, but it does provide you with its analysis of how well you’re doing at choosing your starting words, if you care to look. And if the bot’s learning from our guesses then it should be able to provide increasingly useful feedback. I have to admit that our son who seems to get the word in 2 guesses most frequently is the one who looks at what Wordlebot has to say. Go figure! At any rate, the discussion at the end of the full article does a good job of explaining how the bot (program) uses statistics to make predictions, if you’re into that kind of thing.

My main message is that if you like play Wordle on your own, it can even more fun if you share your efforts with a few equally keen family members and/or friends. Really!!