Wordle: The best word to start the game, according to a language researcher

stuff.co.nz:

If you’ve been on any social media platform in the past two weeks, you’ve probably seen a grid of green, yellow and black squares. This is the latest pandemic phenomenon called Wordle – a free online game that gives users a new word puzzle each day. It was created by Josh Wardle for his crossword-loving partner. As of January 10, the game has 2.7 million players.

In Wordle, players have six tries to guess a target five-letter word. Every time they make a guess, they are told which letters in their guess are in the word and in the correct position (green), and which letters are in it but in a different position (yellow).

It’s sort of like the boardgame Mastermind but with a key difference. In Mastermind, all six colours were equally likely to appear in the target. In Wordle, because guesses and targets all have to be real words, some letters are more likely to appear, making some guesses better than others.

This leads to a question that I’ve seen people discussing at length online: what is the best first word to guess?

* Panga: Te reo Māori Wordle * Tips from an expert: How to solve everyone’s favourite game Wordle * Fix for literacy problems to stop children labelling 'themselves dumb'

For now, let’s define the “best first guess” as the one that is most likely to share the most letters with the target word. What we need to know is: how common are each of the 26 letters in five-letter English words. And not just in any five-letter words, those that have a chance of showing up as targets.

Obscure words like “nisus” (a mental or physical effort to attain an end) or “winze” (a connection between different levels of a mine) need not apply.

I found a recent study that looked at over 60,000 English words and how well-known