I love Wordle. I play it daily so I can write my today’s Wordle answer column, but even if I got a new job as an astronaut or secret agent, I’d still play it, still analyze my results, still obsess over my average score.
However, I HATE today’s game. HATE it so much that I need to use capital letters for emphasis.
Don’t worry, I didn’t fail. My streak is still unbeaten at 1,134. Well, theoretically at least – in practice it was long ago lost to the glitchiness of the NYT’s Games App, but I know I’ve played it every day since January 2022 and I know I’ve never lost. What’s that? You weren’t worried about my streak? Well, thanks.
No, I HATE it because it has a particular format that acts as my personal Kryptonite. And I’m no Superman.
Seriously, I seem to have a mental blind spot when it comes to solving Wordles like this one. And nor am I the only one – because today’s game has an incredibly high average score of 4.9.
Obviously I can’t say any more about it without spoilers, so stop reading now if you haven’t played. Go and get some Wordle hints if you need them, complete the puzzle, then come back and find out why I HATE it so much. Maybe you’ll HATE it too.
SPOILERS FOR TODAY’S WORDLE, MONDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2025, FOLLOW BELOW.
My least favorite Wordle format ever
Wordle is by its nature a game of patterns. Certain letters are more common than others; some appear more regularly in specific places; some pair more readily with others. Those rules create patterns and if you play the game regularly you can learn to spot them. I dug into all this in my analysis of every Wordle answer.
Today’s game has a good example of one particular pattern – and as I said above, it’s an awful one.
The pattern in question is OO, as in BROOK, GOOSE, GROOM, FLOOD and some 50 or so other words that either have been, or will be, Wordle answers.
SPOILERS COMING NOW!
Today’s Wordle answer is GOODY, and it’s almost the most difficult OO word we’ve had so far, with an average of 4.9 according to WordleBot, the in-game AI analysis tool.
The only more difficult OO game was KAZOO (5.1), which I don’t really count given that it also has an uncommon K and an uncommon Z, plus it’s a stupid word that was added by the NYT for no reason other than to troll people.
GOODY is just terrible, isn’t it? It’s not a good word – pun intended. I mean what kind of person even says ‘GOODY’? A three-year-old, maybe, and they should be watching Bluey or something rather than playing Wordle.
I probably wouldn’t mind about that if I’d completed it easily, but I scored a five – the shame! – and it reminded me once again that I have a complete mental block when it comes to solving these words.
To prove how much I struggle with them, I did a little number crunching. I’ve kept a record of every Wordle I’ve completed (yes, I am a fun guy) and my average across 1,136 games so far is 3.67. Not too shabby.
However, looking only at OO words it jumps to 4.19 – more than a half guess higher! That’s even worse than my record on ER games, that other dastardly Wordle format, for which my average is 4.18.
It’s not just me – honest!
And I’m not alone, either. I’ve also kept a record of WordleBot’s average score for every game since it launched in April 2022, and the global average currently stands at 3.96. But for OO words it jumps to a mighty 4.29.
Admittedly, everyone else finds ER words even harder to solve – the average there is 4.41. So, while the rest of you do also struggle with OO answers, you don’t hate them quite so much as those ER nasties.
Of course the worst possible format for any Wordle, ever, would therefore be a combination of OO and ER, right? Oh yes.
We’ve only had one such word so far, WOOER, back in September 2021 (game #78). That was way before anyone was actually playing Wordle, so I only completed it via the Wordle Archive. And I lost.
In fact, that’s my only loss so far, from all 1,333 Wordles. It’s not a proper loss, because it wasn’t played ‘live’ – but it still rankles. Maybe now you can see why I hate OO words so much.
What’s the problem here anyway?
Why are OO words so difficult? Well, any repeated letter makes a Wordle tougher, but I don’t think it’s that as such. Or not only that. After all, as my analysis of every Wordle answer shows, O is the second most likely letter to be repeated, behind only A.
No, I suspect the problem is simply that it’s a repeated vowel, and that they are next to each other rather than split up.
Vowels can go next to any other letter, generally, which makes it much harder to narrow down the characters either side of it. And because you don’t generally get two ‘A’s, ‘I’s or ‘U’s together, ‘O’s and ‘E’s are the only vowels that create this problem.
As an example, if you have a word with two Ls together – also very common – you’ll know they’re almost certainly preceded and followed by a vowel, or a Y (which is itself sometimes a vowel anyway). You wouldn’t get a word that was spelled -RLLD or something – there’s always going to be a vowel either side of those Ls. Same for most other letters.
But with a repeated O, it’s going to have consonants on at least one side, probably both – and there are far more of those. Is it going to be an OOM word like GLOOM? An OON word like SWOON? An OOP word like SCOOP? Is it going to be preceded by an R like in BROOM or a T as in STOOD? There are just too many options.
There’s a similar problem at play with ER words, where it’s incredibly difficult to find the first two consonants for COWER or BOXER or whatever. But at least I know to look out for ER words. With OO words, they always catch me by surprise, even though today’s is the 29th so far.
So there you have it: that’s why I HATE OO words. Let me know in the comments below whether you HATE them too. I bet you do.
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marc.mclaren@futurenet.com (Marc McLaren)
