I can see why, but unfortunately I hadn't identified it, so it was a moot point!Īnyway, I now had three options left, and I'd already found one of them - BIOME. WHOSE worked well enough again, reducing the choices from nine to three - but WordleBot said SMOKE would have been a better guess. (If I'd not been on hard mode, I'd definitely have played a throwaway word at this stage to further narrow it down, but that option wasn't open to me.) Most of the ones I'd found included an S, so I figured I'd play WHOSE next. The others, according to WordleBot after the game, were SMOKE, SPOKE, EVOKE and BOOZE. I did come up with a few, though: WHOSE, SHOVE, BIOME, GOOSE and MOOSE. I'm sure I could have found them all if I'd spent long enough looking, but an -O-E pattern is just so common that I'd have needed to go through every remaining letter looking for possibles it's not like many words jumped out right away. This sort of worked, reducing my options to nine, according to WordleBot, but those options were not all ones I'd yet identified. And with the E at the end, I was pretty sure there would be at least one more vowel in there, so I also wanted to include O, the next most common vowel. I'm sure there's a better way to do this.ĬLONE seemed a good bet, given that C, L and N are all very common consonants. I haven't yet honed my hard-mode strategy to how best to do this, so was reduced to mainly guessing common letters and hoping for the best. So the challenge was to work out what it was paired with. CLONE, for instance, cut it down to 39 and CRONE to 28.Ĭlearly, a green E at the end leaves lots of options, because it's the single most common letter positioning in the game. CRANE (125), STARE (121), TRACE (126) and STARE (125) were all in the same ballpark, and there were only a few that reduced the options drastically. Not that many start words fared much better. Here, I began with TRADE - a word that uses five common letters in common positions, and which WordleBot liked enough to award a 96 skill rating to in hard mode, but which only gave me a green E at the end and which left me with 127 possible solutions. I wasn't helped much by my choice of the best Wordle start words. That was the issue with mine, which I played on hard mode and which left me scrambling for a poor 5/6 today. However, the too-many-options problem might have reared its head depending on how your game went. The B at the start and E at the end are very common, at least, with the former being the third most likely starting letter and the latter being the most common ending. Don't be too surprised if it's a while before we see any more. Curiously, we've now had three in 16 games, with PRIZE (#438) and GAUZE (#435) the others. As I show in my analysis of every Wordle answer, this occurs just 40 times in the total of 2,308 answers, meaning you'd only expect to see one every 57 games. But it's still less likely than finding an O on its own, obviously, so it may well have taken you an extra guess to uncover that pattern. It's also the second most likely to be repeated next to itself, after L, so it's not in itself an uncommon occurrence. Repeated letters have been a feature of those 10 games, having been present in all but two of them, and this time the duplicated O is paired with an uncommon Z to make for a really tough answer to find.Īs it happens, the OO it is not the worst thing about it, because O is the second most likely likely to be repeated, after E.

The NYT's WordleBot tool says people are solving this one in 4.7 guesses in normal mode, or 4.6 on hard mode, which makes it the toughest we've had for 10 games dating back to GULLY (#441). You know how almost all of the recent Wordles have been quite difficult? Well this is the hardest one yet. So, what is today's Wordle answer for game #450?

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