Tom, @tomjneill on Twitter, has posted a Wordle Solver, on his notfunatparties website.
You fill in the guess it suggests on Wordle or hello wordl or whatever; tick the little boxes for each letter to say whether it scored green, yellow, or black, and it suggests the best possible word to try next. At each stage it tells you how many possible words remain, and tells you when it's definitely found the solution word even before you enter it into Wordle.
Tom says he's discovered that Wordle appears to select from about 2,000 well-known words, but allows you to enter another 13,000 valid words as guesses. He suggests the best strategy may be to use LARES as your opening guess. You'll never get the answer in one, because Wordle will never use LARES as the word of the day, but the possible results from LARES eliminate more of the 2,000 well-known words than RAISE does. He agrees that RAISE is the best possible first guess if you want to stand a (small) chance of getting the answer in one. His solver only uses the 2,000 well-known words, because it doesn't want to confuse people by using weird words like LARES.
Lares: Guardian deities in ancient Roman religion.
Tom says he's discovered that Wordle appears to select from about 2,000 well-known words
Interesting! I was wondering about this. Words with multiple doubles or a triple letter could be streak busters if the player doesn’t stumble onto the right letters.
(With something like ‘yummy’ my first two guesses would give me a single yellow and no idea where to go from there.)
With something like ‘yummy’ my first two guesses would give me a single yellow and no idea where to go from there.
Tom's solver doesn't include YUMMY.
It guessed:
RAISE
COULD
NYMPH
GUMMY
And when I entered: black,green,green,green,green for its GUMMY guess, it confidently asserted that MUMMY was the solution. YUMMY isn't one of its 2,315 words.