Bot Settles on Best Opening Word in Wordle

The tip will make sense for those who play Wordle, not so much for the uninitiated. Start with "crane." That turns out to be the best opening word in the popular puzzle, in which players get six tries to guess the five-letter solution, according to a new tool called GoogleBot from the New York Times. The bot is designed to give people advice on what they might have done better after completing the day's puzzle. But as NME notes, the explainer on how it works weighs in on what has become a lively debate about which word is the best opener. The key point:

• "WordleBot solves the 2,309 possible Wordles using the fewest number of guesses when it starts with CRANE in normal mode and DEALT in 'hard mode,'" according to the explainer. "This may surprise some readers, who have seen, in various places across the internet, people claim that words like IRATE, SALET or RAISE are the best openers. The truth is that it depends exactly how you’re playing and whether you are a human or a computer."
• Also of note: The bot kept its work confined to roughly 4,500 commonly used words rather than the 13,000 or so words that are technically valid. That is, it skipped obscure ones such as VOEMA and ZEBUB.
• More advice: Mashable previously weighed in about all this, nothing that words such as ADIEU, AUDIO, and OUIJA are solid opening choices because of their vowels.

(More Wordle stories.)