Wordle’s best starting word found by YouTuber using math

Search for Wordle’s best starting word has been going on for as long as the word game has been popular and everyone’s got their own solutions. On Sunday, Grant Sanderson, also known by 3Blue1Brown on YouTube, shared a video showing his method of coming up with the perfect word. WordleHis word-solving program was created to ensure that every word is as perfect.

To get the easy thing out of the way first, Sanderson found that the best starting word is “crane,” but with a few caveats.

Sanderson used simulations of different first words with optimal follow-ups in order to determine which one gave him the best answers. This means that to match his results, you’d need to pick the perfect second word too, based on what you learned from using “crane.” This isn’t exactly easy, but a good baseline might be to think of a word like “sloth,” which includes frequently used letters that aren’t in “crane.” Between these two words, you should be left with a pretty short list of possibilities for your third guess.

You could still have a lot of fun, even if it was just a couple. Wordle tips, Sanderson’s video itself is excellent for plenty of other reasons. Although Wordle is its framework, it also doubles a great lesson on information theory that’s broken down into easy-to-understand terms, but never oversimplified.

Sanderson also discusses how and why he created his puzzle-solving software. He uses a huge list of almost 13,000 five letter words to calculate word frequency. This is far more than what the original list contains. WordleIt then gives you the best guess it can make based on that list. He also discusses how the program calculates uncertainty, and what information each optimized guess provides.

You can also watch videos that may improve your life. Wordle score, and make each of your own guesses a little better, it’s great for that too.