Did we ever discover Raz' first guess for when the Wordle was VALET? I can only imagine it was salet and what the heck does that even mean?
A salet is a Medieval helmet with a brim flaring in the back. The word is a cousin to the word "sally," as in "to sally forth." Both words are derived from a French root that means "to jut out."
It's a word I use fairly often as a first guess. I've had pretty good luck with it. Especially lately.
Pretty good starting word. 2 vowels and 3 consonants, at least 2 of which are fairly common.
Yeah, and I've been studying letter distributions in five-letter words in English. There's some pretty trippy stuff out there on the subject, but also a lot of bullshit, so data analyst beware.
Nevertheless, as Golfin' Dave and I proved yesterday, it's one thing to know something about the distributions and another to apply the discipline. The key letter yesterday was N, which has the fifth-highest distribution across all positions. But both he and I kept trying words that didn't have it. My first guess yesterday gave me A and E in yellow. The letter A spikes in the 3rd position and E spikes in the 5th position. So my second guess got both A and E in green, but gave me no more. At that point I should have gone to using N, given the letters I'd used incorrectly. And I should have put it in the 4th position, because it spikes there. But...I just kept guessing other words until I finally pulled my head out of my ass on the fifth guess. Dave was doing the same thing. If I'd pulled my head out on the third guess, I'd have had it on the third guess if I was lucky or the fourth guess if I wasn't because there are only like five words that end in ANE, only two of them are remotely common, and one of those two was the answer yesterday.
it's like playing Texas Hold 'Em. It's really a simple game to make money on, if you know your percentages, don't try to get cute, and fold on the deal a LOT. But you can't make a lot of money that way, and the others at the table are trying to take yours away, and the blinds whittle some away from you, so the temptation to get cute is really strong and takes an iron will to resist.