[bazzargh]

I hadn't seen anyone else use that pair when I suggested it in early Jan https://twitter.com/bazzargh/status/1477998502747779079 ... but I guess there aren't many choices with those letters and other people were bound to hit on those words! Seems quite popular now.

For octordle/sedecordle I found that the 2 standard guesses wasn't enough to stop getting stuck, particularly it's missing Y for words that use that as a vowel. For those puzzles, I use INPUT SHAME GLORY, but I've not attempted to check if this is anything like optimal - I very rarely fail those puzzles with these 3 tho.

[ghaff]

I don't regularly play octordle but came to the conclusion that you really want at least 3 start words. Otherwise, you start trying to solve with guesses that aren't globally optimum and run out of guesses.