Why adieu is a terrible first guess in Wordle

kats.coffee

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Author here - I saw a few analyses of Wordle on here over the last few days, but it didn't seem like the strategies others used were optimal. They managed to get very good results usually by only training on the "target" set, which is the list of solutions, rather than on the more correct list of all words, which is how a human approaches this problem. I believe that this solution is indeed optimal with respect to the problem.

I noticed that a lot of the words in that list aren't even words, or at least not English ones. There are several on the first screenful already, suggesting that there probably are a significant number of them spread throughout the list. So you could probably make it even more efficient with a stricter dictionary.

That dictionary is the same dictionary used by Wordle. It was extracted from the Wordle app. I’m pretty sure all of them are valid English words, which ones do you think are not valid English words?

Abacs is an example. But since you posted this, I looked some of them up and see there are a whole lot of uncommon words, but not necessarily non-words. A lot of the words I was questioning are actually foreign words that transferred to English for when speaking about the foreign concepts. Eg: Abuna.

Except I didn't find a definition for abacs, but it's probably just not in every dictionary.

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