[thurn]

I also did this and also got AEROS/UNLIT (well, AROSE/UNTIL in my case). You've made the same minor error I did of looking at the frequency distribution of all guessable wordle words, not the smaller list of possible answers, which has a different frequency distribution. If you look at that you get ORATE/LYSIN as the best starting pair (based on frequency only, not considering position)

[ghusbands]

Calling not cheating an "error" is odd. The hypothetical game is one in which any valid word could be the answer. If you're going to use the list of answers, just look up the answer for today's date and get it right on the first guess.

[less_less]

If you're writing a program to solve Wordle, you're already cheating in some sense.

Whether or not you use the target word list, it's important to recognize that there *are* two separate lists: you can guess almost any plausible 5-letter word, even bullshit Scrabble words like SOARE. But the target word will always be a relatively common word, because the game is designed to be winnable for ordinary English speakers. Honestly the word list is still a little harder than I would have picked for a broad audience; eg REBUS the other day was on the obscure side.

It's also worth noting that the target word will never be a 3- or 4-letter word pluralized by adding -ES or -S. This is something that you could notice simply by playing for a couple weeks. These seem to have been excluded manually or by a regex: it does have plural words of other forms, and it has words with other endings like -ER or -ING.

[thurn]

Well, the author is already looking at the larger Wordle wordlist, probably using an english dictionary would be more in the 'not cheating' spirit.