Strategies for Wordle & Wordle-Like Puzzles! Spoilers for 30 October 2026

Ye Olde Blogge has an October surprise! I’ve been Wordling for a couple of years now and have been fascinated with strategy from the begining. My obsession caused me to add the French Le Mot and Canadian Canuckle to the mix. Now, I start every day with “Mah puzzles.” But, I’m not that old coot whose puzzles give purpose and meaning to his life. Honest, I’m not. I’m not. Really. You have to believe me. They don’t. Do they? Oh, god, they probably do. Without my word puzzles who am I?

I started posting my puzzle results to Bluesky, and it has taken over my feed. I liked the other regular Wordlers’ puzzle results, began posting comments on them, and fielding comments on mine. But, in a twist that makes Ye Olde Blogge so special, I began analyzing other people’s puzzles along with my own. I realized that most people didn’t seem to bring a consistent strategy or systematic exploration of the possibilities. My comments on my own puzzles and theirs started to offer strategic hints, which most people didn’t seem to appreciate. Go figure. Something I enjoyed and that added depth to my life left most people feeling either cold or a little insulted. Story of my life. I don’t even need my old ma’s restless ghost to tell me that. She did anyway, but that’s her.

Anywho, like most other things in my life, I began thinking about making a regular blog post on Wordle strategy. After about six months of procrastination and several false starts. Every project has the appropriate amount of procrastination, right? You can’t be successful until you’ve procrastinated sufficiently before beginning. It helps the sun spot activity align with whatever energies you need for the project. Honest. That’s true. Science fact and everything.

Okay, here’s the inaugural post.

General Strategy

Wordle and its various variants are more than word games, they are games of probability and logic. Before you roll your eyes and agree with my mother’s ghost that I’ve organized your favorite morning ritual and taken all the fun out of it, hold on a minute. In these games, you are playing a game against your own brain’s hardwired biases. By understanding your biases and improving your use of strategies, you’ll be able to skew your outcomes towards threes and diminish the number of the dreaded x/6’s you come up with.

If your daily goal is to guess the answer in as few steps as possible, your intuition is likely lying to you. The strategies for how you beat your own lying eyes are as difficult as those used to defeat the lies of Cheat-in-Chief. There are far too many to cover in one post, so we’ll zero in on a few as illustrated in some of the daily puzzles and talk about others as we go.

In general, you want to shift from trying to get the answer to eliminating possibilities. It is counterintuitive, but it results in the best success rates over time. But, how do you begin eliminating words when the entire corpus of English five letter words for the pool of possibilities. And, there is the first error. Wordle consists of a much more limited number of words than the universe of all five-letter words in English. Originally, it had 2800+ words. I think when the NY Times took it over, they’ve added words and are repeating words.

The point is, if you’re a smarty smarty then you knew that S T R N L are the most frequently used consonants more or less in that order and E A O I U is the order of the vowels. However, when you analyze the word bank of Wordle solutions the order looks like this: R T L S N C D H P M. Not only is the order disturbed but the second tier of frequently used consonants is wrong. It should be D and G, but it’s not. It includes four of the third tier letters and skips G altogether.

A scientific paper tells us that eliminating letters is the name of the game. Start with the most frequently used letters and draw your starter from that. Your starter word should use some combination of R T L S N and E A O.

Your tier two word should be an elimination word. No matter what the result from the starter, NONE of the letters appearing in tier one should appear in tier two. You should not ever dream of a twodle. Twodles are just luck.

Continue like this until you get enough green letters to “know” what the word is. In subsequent posts, I’ll cover more strategies, but let me know what you think in the comments.

Le Mot #1758 30 October 2026

I don’t speak much French. I have made sporadic attempts to learn French over the years. I actually survive quite well in France when left to my own devices. Only a few French people have been rude about it. I still limp after a visit to wine store looking for a bottle to go with the night’s dinner. Who knew French wine clerks were so touchy about their language and wine?

Anywho. I need some help with considering possibilities, so I use Win Every Game’s French Wordle Helper. It lists five letter words that either use letters in the positions designated or contain the letters you list. My statistics are much better for the French that I don’t understand than for the English puzzles I do understand. You’ll see.

I used an elimination word on tier two. It is difficult to get a word that uses five untested letters, so testing four was great. And, it paid off. Now I had four of the five letters of the word.

That left two words, CANIF (pocketknife) and CANIN (canine).

A quick assessment of the letters used, though, showed that there were three C’s, two F’s, two P’s, and one D, M, and T. Obviously, testing the C’s F’s and P’s was in order, but there are no French words that use them, so CPM had to do.

Unfortunately, the green C left two possibilities. There was nothing left to do but guess. Still, after tier two I was left with a possible three and a guaranteed four. I’ll take it any day. A great example of using the elimination method, especially when the letters are all in the first two ranks of frequency use.

Canuckle #1630 10-30-26

This Canuckle puzzle shows what happens when there isn’t such a nice match up between your guesses and the solution.

When I chose my elimination word, I wanted one that used E so I could look for its home. If you’re going to repeat a letter, it may as well help, right? DONER also tested the remaining two consonants and the vowel.

On tier three, I had a choice, test the other vowels or not. It’s a tough choice. But, testing the Y at the end is smart and we had three other positions for the E, so HEMPY wasn’t a bad choice, and with marijuana legal in Canada, it was a definite possibility.

Let’s take a look at what Win Every Game Wordle Helper gave us as after tier three:

Here’s where you need a bit of logic. I could use an elimination word,hoping to find something that used GWBK or some combination. It didn’t seem likely. But, three of the words all used B. By testing the B with one of the words, I could eliminate three of the four. If there was no b, it had to be GEEKY. If I used the leading B, then I either had it right or it was one of the other two. However, the longer I looked at it, the more I thought that Webby as in the Webby awards was probably it. I decided to test it.

The Canada connection in Canuckle is a red herring until you get close to the solution. Once you’ve got the field narrowed to a manageable number of candidates, evaluate them for their relationship to Canada. That’s probably your word.

Wordle #1959 10-30-26

This Wordle puzzle is a good example of the elimination method when the most frequently occurring consonants and vowels make up three of the five letters of the word.

We got lucky and picked up two more letters, one of which was a green. But, the D had to go in the fourth position, right? I don’t know of any words that use LD in the second and third positions and an E in fifth.

SLIDE was the only word that fit the pattern of _ L _ D E .

There you have it. The most efficient way to reach the solution in these Wordly puzzles is to start by eliminating the most frequently used letters.

Let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love to hear from Wordly puzzlers and all you puzzle makers out there.

Next week, I’ll cover other strategies and implications. There are lots.

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