Wordle Starter Words: Why I'm Finally Saying Adieu to ADIEU
Here's a whole new batch of Wordle starter words because, honestly, I was getting nowhere with ADIEU.
- Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year" award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Notice how only one letter shows up as present in the winning word? Good luck with that second guess.
Goodbye to you, ADIEU. Or should I say good riddance.
I started playing Wordle back in December, even before software developer Josh Wardle sold the online word-guessing game to The New York Times for big bucks. And, man, was I cocky. I'm an English major! I know words! What's that famous Ralph Wiggum line? "Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
So I immediately seized on the trend of using ADIEU as a first-play word because just look at it! Four vowels, all crammed into your very first guess! Here was my thinking: If I get all the vowel-guessing out of the way, then I can at least start jigsaw-puzzling the middle parts of the word, and then just cherry-pick the right consonants on my way to an easy win.
What was I even thinking?
There are only five vowels but 21 consonants. (Yes, "y" can go either way.) Even if ADIEU reveals that the word has an A and an E in it or whatever, I'm left to limp my way through the rest of my guesses, with only one consonant, D, eliminated. It's like the whole damn dictionary remains in play.
But if I knew that the word had some popular consonants, say, a T and an R, I might be on my way to STARE. Or TRACE. Or CHART. I probably wouldn't get the answer on my second try. But if I threw some more consonants at the wall, like wet spaghetti, some of them might stick.
So now I'm on a consonant kick. As we know from Wheel of Fortune, the letters RSTLNE are excruciatingly popular, with Slate reporting that those six letters represent approximately 45 percent of all letters in a standard English text. (Just think "rest line" and you'll remember all of them, with an also-popular "I" thrown in.)
Want a few more letters to play with? Reader's Digest claims that the 10 most common letters in the Oxford English Dictionary are EARIOTNSLC. Some people don't like to use an S at all, because you can save that for when you really need to guess a plural, but I hardly ever use that strategy.
So here's a dozen possible starter words, in no particular order, that lean heavily on those popularity lists. I'm going to put them here so I remember them the next time I panic and am tempted to start with ADIEU.
LEARN
NAILS
ORATE
RAISE
RENAL
SNARE
SAINT
STEAL
SNAIL
TRIAL
TALON
TRAIN
If I discover that this strategy sucks, I'll rip up the plan, start over and let you know. Wish me luck.