Long story short: make a copy of this spreadsheet to speed up your Wordle-solving!

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The gory details: If you obsess over Wordle like I do, you’ve probably run into the conundrum of

• having narrowed the answer to a smallish set of words, but
• being unsure which word to play next.

My friend Dave and I are convinced: the best approach is to list all the candidate words, count the number of times each letter appears in all the candidates, and play the word whose letters appears in the most candidates.

Not difficult, but time-consuming! Save yourself time by entering the words in the Wordle Counter, and letting it do the counting for you.

Example: today (September 26th, 2023), I was staring at this after two turns:¹

I came up with five possible words:
FOCAL
LOCAL
LOYAL
MODAL
VOCAL

. . . but which one’s the best to play next?

1] I pasted those five words into Wordle Counter’s “Input: Word List” tab:

2] then on the “Input: Parameters” tab I told Wordle Counter which letters I wanted to count (and activating the “Count by WORD?” setting prevents a duplicate letter from being double-counted within a single word):

And voila, Wordle Counter tells me how many times letters appear in those spots:

. . . and how many times each of those letters appears in my candidate words:

Armed with that information, I played the highest-freq word LOCAL and guaranteed getting the answer in two or fewer guesses:

try it out!²

1. RAISE as my first play? Yup, I’m convinced, after looking at Wikipedia’s entry on letter frequencies (and sorting the table by descending order of letters in dictionary words), that RAISE is your best play. Come at me, bro. ↩︎
2. I’m still tweaking it. I’m not sure it’s working right in every situation, but I’m really proud of some of the ARRAYFORMULA() logic. ↩︎