For a long period during the height of the NYT Games craze of 2020, new Wordle strategies appeared on the timeline like clockwork. But in the years since, players have honed their personal strategies in ways that have made keeping up with daily streaks a piece of cake.
That doesn’t mean there’s not more to mine from the game. This week, social media users came across an apparently foolproof way to whittle away at incorrect letters and make use of those anagram skills.
According to a viral X post by user and Wordle strategist @rudy_betrayed, you can start by popping in these five words: CHUNK, FJORD, VIBEX, WALTZ, and GYMPS. The post has already racked up 22,000 bookmarks.
[Note: That last word is defined by Oxford Languages on Google as “twisted silk, worsted, or cotton with cord or wire running through it, used chiefly as upholstery trimming.” But it’s also listed as a potential derivative of a derogatory phrase. While it’s a high-value Words With Friends entry, it’s not valid in the Merriam Webster Scrabble dictionary. It may work for the dictionary’s dupe Quordle, though.]
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The strategy makes use of 25 unique letters in the game’s first five rounds, only missing the ornery letter Q, giving users just one slot to guess the winning word. But according to the alphabet math and players who use the strategy, it’s nearly impossible not to spot the word among the grey tiles.
There’s still a bit of brainwork needed, of course, like parsing letter groups that have multiple anagrams. It’s not going to always help if you don’t know the word to begin with, because that’s just how Wordle works. And, as many social media users argued in the post’s quotes, maybe it’s sucking the fun out of thing to try to “hack” the game in the name of a higher score.
But if you’re a pretty good Wordler already — and especially if it’s a week like “MYRRH” — this is definitely a trick worth trying.
Not the day you’re after? Here’s the solution to yesterday’s Wordle.
