Wordle and the First Word

If you’re choosing a first word in Wordle, I think the goal is to minimize the number of remaining candidate words in the worst case.

So for example if you consider the starting word “BAITS”, you can score every possible candidate word against this starting word. Each outcome will be a specific result, which you can store in base 3 (e.g. using “2” for misses, “1” for out of position, and “0” for a match). If you count all the outcomes, the bucket with the largest count is your worst case.

For the first guess the worst-case bucket may be the “22222” bucket (all misses), but not necessarily. You can bucket all the possible words, and the bucket with the most words is that worst case.

Wordle maintains two lists, a list of words that can be chosen as word of the day, and a list of words that will be accepted, but can’t be solutions.

Anagrams are not equivalent in Wordle, because the change in letter order will change which buckets the words go into. So for example, “AROSE” has a worst-case bucket with 867 words in it, but “AEROS” has a worst-case bucket with only 801 words.

Here are some good starting choices.

aisle 906
arise 882
arose 867
saner 840
snare 840
aeros 801
paseo 776
reais 769
serai 697

That would mean that “SERAI” (697) would be the best first word (though it’s never a solution), and “SNARE” or “SANER” (840) would be the best choice that could also be a solution.