The Lemon Fool

I was recently introduced to a word game called Wordle, and found it quite addictive - https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

I love games like this, but find them addictive, so I was quite relieved to see that they only produce one a day, thereby limiting the amount of time I can spend on it.

Until someone pointed out that there's an archive - https://octokatherine.github.io/word-master/

Oh dear!

Yes, that’s fun. It’s natural to want to improve so I find any online game that gives me my stats after each game somewhat addictive. 16 hours until the next one!

Pendrainllwyn

Have also found this site. Have so far managed to work out all the words. Fastest in 3, like the idea of 1 a day so doesn't take up too much time and is thus not "addictive".

seagles wrote:Have also found this site. Have so far managed to work out all the words. Fastest in 3, like the idea of 1 a day so doesn't take up too much time and is thus not "addictive".

Or is that addictive.... .....and delayed?!

1 for 1 - in 4
15hrs to wait.. must get the kids playing Mastermind!


-sd

Yes it is addictive. I now use the same words for the first two or three entries, and can usually solve it with 4 tries (easy mode). Explained below but hidden for those who don't want to see it.


I use the English letter frequency sequence (see Wikipedia Letter_frequency) to construct three separate words which don't repeat letters.

The first is constructed from the first six most frequent letters(*) (EARIOT): TERAI
(An aside, I use TERAI rather than IRATE because T has a higher relative frequency as the first letter of a word.)

Once those letters are used, the second word is constructed from the next letters (ONSLCU): CONUS

The third word uses the Y: LYMPH

These words test all the vowels and half the alphabet in three goes, and should normally yield three or four yellows or green squares. Of the consonants that then remain, XZJQ (the least frequent) can usually be discounted as they won't obviously fit the solution. But it is quite possible that two words yield nothing other than greys, which is often an indicator that some letters are repeated.

If you try these three on today's word (#218) you will catch all five letters and know the starting letter. From there, the word is obvious.

(*) Edit: That letter frequency sequence applies to the whole dictionary, one makes an assumption that the frequency across 5 letter words is broadly the same.

Pendrainllwyn wrote:Yes, that’s fun. It’s natural to want to improve so I find any online game that gives me my stats after each game somewhat addictive. 16 hours until the next one!

servodude wrote:15hrs to wait.. must get the kids playing Mastermind!

You don't have to, you can play old or random games here.

https://wordle.berknation.com/

Apologies for just trashing whatever else you were supposed to be doing today.

0-0 in six!!! But close. One letter out.

Headache now.

Can you sign up so they send you the puzzles each day?

sg31 wrote:Can you sign up so they send you the puzzles each day?

You can just bookmark the site.
https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
Easy.

I've no idea how this game works. Can someone help an old man out, please?

UnclePhilip wrote:I've no idea how this game works. Can someone help an old man out, please?

The aim is deduce a five letter word.

You have no initial clues, but six attempts to work it out.

You enter a five letter word into the first row of the grid and press enter. Letters in the word you have entered will turn grey, amber or green.

Green ones, correct letter guessed and in correct place. Amber, correct letter in wrong place, grey, letter not in the word.

Make second random guess, or an educated guess based on the outcome of your first, and repeat until you have correctly deduced the word or have used up all of your six attempts.

If you've ever watched Lingo on daytime ITV, it is a quite similar.

UnclePhilip wrote:I've no idea how this game works. Can someone help an old man out, please?

You're trying to guess/deduce a five letter word.

Start by entering your first guess into the first row by clicking the letters on the keypad at the bottom of the page, and then click the Enter button.

The letters that are not in the target word will turn grey. The letters that are in the target word but are in the wrong positions will turn gold(ish), and those that are and are in the right position will turn green.

Now enter your second guess into the second row by the same mechanism. And then the third, etc, but as you go along you have more and more information about what letters are, and are not, in the target word and their correct/incorrect positions, and at some point you should (hopefully!) be able to guess the target word before you run out of rows.

staffordian wrote:

UnclePhilip wrote:I've no idea how this game works. Can someone help an old man out, please?

The aim is deduce a five letter word.

You have no initial clues, but six attempts to work it out.

You enter a five letter word into the first row of the grid and press enter. Letters in the word you have entered will turn grey, amber or green.

Green ones, correct letter guessed and in correct place. Amber, correct letter in wrong place, grey, letter not in the word.

Make second random guess, or an educated guess based on the outcome of your first, and repeat until you have correctly deduced the word or have used up all of your six attempts.

If you've ever watched Lingo on daytime ITV, it is a quite similar.

Each guess has to be a proper 5 letter word, not a random letter selection.
Game is quite addictive

Don't eliminate words that have the same letter twice. In these cases, where the duplicated letter has been entered once, it will only show as orange or green once.

Also be prepared for words that have different spellings between Britain and America. In those cases you'll want to FAVOR the American spelling. Yes, FAVOR was the word a couple of weeks ago.

HTH,

Watis

We used to have a kids game called hangman along very similar lines. Guess letters, make a word.

Only hangman never had a word length restriction. And long words tend to be, perhaps counterintuitively, easier than short ones.

UncleEbenezer wrote:We used to have a kids game called hangman along very similar lines. Guess letters, make a word.

Only hangman never had a word length restriction. And long words tend to be, perhaps counterintuitively, easier than short ones.

I remember Hangman. Back in the 90s, I wrote a C program for the Apple Mac in my wife's school to implement Hangman. The kids loved it, especially the bloodcurdling scream when they failed to guess the word. I think it encouraged them to spell badly

--kiloran (and I've never used C since. Horrible language!)

As I'm sure many others did too, I used to play a somewhat related game in the 1970s, guessing a four digit number.

It involved two players, each player taking it in turn to guess the opponent's number. You were told how many were correct and how many were in the right place, but not which of the digits were correct or in the right place. I think it was later developed into a game by a toy maker.

Similarly addictive.

That boardgame was called Mastermind.. very similar to Wordle. I remember it well!

I see that Twitter has just banned an account that sent insulting tweets to anyone who tweeted their Wordle result, including telling them what the next day's word is, since this is embedded in the game code in a non-secure way.

Midsmartin wrote:That boardgame was called Mastermind...

Which was a commercial version of Cows & Bulls, which I'll bet is what staffordian is remembering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_Cows

mc2fool wrote:

Midsmartin wrote:That boardgame was called Mastermind...

Which was a commercial version of Cows & Bulls, which I'll bet is what staffordian is remembering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_Cows

Just so.

I don't recall what we actually called the game, and I'd forgotten how we "called" the scores of each attempt. But reading that article reminded me that we called correctly placed and correct but wrongly placed numbers as bulls and strikes respectively.