2024-06-08 Evil wordle words

From time to time, I play the odd game of wordle. I even wrote a wordle clone for my old 64KiB Tandy Color Computer in BASIC, because, well, COVID-19. It was made slightly interesting by the fact that the word list is ~14KiB and the word guess list is 50KiB, and there's only ~22KiB of RAM to play with - which meant doing a binary search into an indexed word list on disk. It works surprisingly well, and you can even play it online.

Anyway, I digress.

Playing wordle, I started noticing obvious patterns that are very hard to get due to ambiguity - several words with only one character difference, which got me wondering what's the worst pattern? Easy enough to find out:

$ awk '//{for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) {print substr($0, 1, i) "." substr($0, i + 2)}}' < wordle.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1nr
   9 .ight
   8 .ound
   7 .atch
   7 .ower
   7 sha.e
   6 .aste
   6 .atty
   6 .aunt
   6 .illy
   6 gra.e
…

So what are these words? Looking at the top few:

$ grep '.ight' wordle.txt                                                                                                         
eight
fight
light
might
night
right
sight
tight
wight
$ grep '.ound' wordle.txt
bound
found
hound
mound
pound
round
sound
wound
$ grep '.atch' wordle.txt
batch
catch
hatch
latch
match
patch
watch
$ grep '.ower' wordle.txt
cower
lower
mower
power
rower
sower
tower
$ grep 'sha.e' wordle.txt
shade
shake
shale
shame
shape
share
shave

Yep, I definitely recognise those! Evil! You only get 6 guesses; these are all pure luck.