A tiny fraction of English words can solve any puzzle
While the English language contains nearly half a million words, a master list of just 2,309 singular nouns dictates every win and loss in the world's favorite word game.
The game of Wordle is not a test of your entire vocabulary, but a mathematical exercise in narrowing down a highly curated list of five-letter nouns. To ensure the game remains solvable, the original 2013 prototype excluded plurals and obscure terms, leaving a pool so small it represents just 0.01 percent of the English dictionary. This scarcity allows players to use a strategy called entropy optimization. By starting with a word like CRANE, which balances common vowels and consonants, players can instantly eliminate sixty percent of the most frequent letter pairings in the language.
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