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This strategy seems to avoid words that Wordle will accept, while not choosing them as word-of-the-day, e.g. SERAI.

If your goal is to minimize the number of remaining words in the worst case, I think SERAI is the winner, leaving you with at most 697 choices. [Assuming my code is right]

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Genuinely curious, why would you use SERAI rather than ARISE? Functionally equivalent, doesn't seem like a made-up word, and might actually be the answer one day.

S is very common as the first letter, so having it in that position gives you more information than having it in fourth position (due to higher probability of green).

As CrazyStat hints, anagrams are not equivalent in Wordle, because changing the word order means that you're also changing the bucketing, the words in the anagram shifting between yellow and green.

To be more specific, I counted 882 possible words in the worst case using ARISE, versus 697 using SERAI.

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