Any comments on this Wordle data?

[JenniferMurphy]

Several other family members (not me) are Wordle nuts. They debate with each other about the best words to start with. It seemed to me that there ought to be a way to analyze the probabiities, so I decided to do a little "research". I downloaded several lists of 5-letter words, merged them, and removed duplicates. I ended up with 5,760 words. I wrote some code to count how often each letter occurs in each position in each word (1-5). I got this chart.

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I was surprised by the variability from position to position. "S", for example, is the most common letter in 1st and last position, but only #17 in 2nd. "K" is #7 overall and #4 in 4th position. So it seems pretty clear that the position of a letter really matters.

Picking letters from this chart, I suggested 3 possible first words: SAINT, CORES, & COATS. They seemed to contain all letters fairly high of the chart.

Then it occurred to me that I could calculate the average frequency of the letters in each word and then sort that list. Here are the top 150 words. My word CORES came in at #8, but the other two did not fare so well. COATS is #264 and SAINT is #2080, both off the chart below.

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I think the minisheet plus the VBA code is a bit too much to post here, so I've uploaded them both to this OneDrive folder. This was a quick and dirty coding run, so Im sure there are far better ways to do it. But I'd still be interested in any comments and/or suggestions for different or better data.

OneDrive

1drv.ms

Cheers...

 

[JenniferMurphy]

Do your statistics include words where one letter appears more than once - like PAPER, APPLY etc. ? Those ones can really trip you up as having already guessed one correct letter you are then looking for letters other than the ones already used!

Yes. My code first tallies the number of times each letter occurs in each position in each of the 5,760 words. That's the first table. It then uses those numbers to calculate an average frequency for each word by averaging the frequencies of each letter in that word.

Here are the numbers for your two words:

Wordle.xlsm
	V	W	X	Y	Z	AA	AB
3	Ltr	Freq	Rank		Ltr	Freq	Rank
4	A	5.14	9		P	6.7	9
5	P	1.96	11		A	16.16	11
6	P	2.93	14		P	2.93	14
7	L	4.22	10		E	21.34	10
8	Y	11.55	2		R	6.96	2
9		5.58	5044			10.82	1689
Tallies

 

[Skyybot]

On my rating list based on letter frequencies by position, SHOUT is #4398, BREAD is #627.

Just for fun, is there any way to include actual completion stats? For instance, my completions stats are as follows:
Number of Guesses: 1 = 0, 2 = 6, 3 = 60, 4 = 81, 5 = 78, 6 = 40. I don't know what those numbers are based on. I've "played" a total of 312 games. Maybe they're percentages.