[biesnecker]

Over the weekend I wrote a tool to help me figure this out: https://github.com/biesnecker/wordlesmith

Wordle's wordlist is interesting. There is a large (~10,000 words) list of words that it will accept as guesses but that will never be the answer, and a much smaller (~2500 words) list of words it will both accept and could be the answer.

My tool's simple algorithm scores words by taking the product of the frequency with which each of its letters appears in the wordlist multiplied by the frequency that the letter appears in that specific spot. When looking at the entire list of words the top five choices are:

1. tares 2. lares 3. cares 4. pares 5. dares

However, if you just look at the words that could be answers (which I what I've decided to do), the list changes to:

1. soare 2. saine 3. slane 4. saice 5. slate

In either case I've never had a puzzle where repeatedly choosing the first suggested word didn't get me to the answer in six or fewer guesses.

[8note]

The American spelling of favor got me yesterday. I'd never think of it as a possibility for a 5 letter word. That word list is pretty handy for knowing which words are in scope

[jhas78asd]

Fun. I spent an hour and made this and just tried to score words with vowels and wheel of fortune consonants to start to make a good initial guess. IRATE came up. I like the frequency idea and the entropy discussion and have more ideas.

https://github.com/andyatkinson/wordle_solver

[ledauphin]

One of the things noted by the OP is that you can get stuck in a rut if you don't do more info-gathering than just the first word.

I would recommend not even trying to guess the word on attempt 2 - much better almost always to guess 5 totally different letters.

[peeters]

Hard mode is so much more fun (which disallows this strategy). It changes it up much more each day and is more challenging.

[LimitedInfo]

Happy to see tares as your top choice. I used the same method and came to the same word.