Wordle Nov 12, 2022

I made a weird third guess due to coffee deficiency.

After getting yellow ‘A’ and ‘E’ on my first guess, I tried to think of words with high-probability letters, following the old “ETAOIN SHRDLU” letter-frequency-mnemonic. STEAM is OK, STEAL has ‘L’, which is in “SHRDLU”. NYT Wordlebot approves of STEAM, gives me an 81, but it says PETAL would be better.

Using Regular Expressions to find dictionary words that might be the answer after 2nd guess (STEAM):

#!/bin/bash
set -eou pipefail

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep '^[^crnsm][^crnsmt][^crnsmea][^crnsma][^crnsme]$'

It finds 680 words.

The ‘X’ LATEX is an extremely low probability letter. Wordlebot gives a 99 to LATEX. Wordlebot’s better alternatives: DELTA and VALET (the answer).

This little program gives dictionary words that might be answers after third guess (LATEX):

#!/bin/bash
set -eou pipefail

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep '^[^crnsml]a[^crnsmteax]e[^crnsme]$'

That yields 41 possible words.

I chose LATEX because I couldn’t think of a word beginning with ‘T’. After the fact, I validated my inability with this program:

#!/bin/bash
set -eou pipefail

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep 'ta[^crnsmaet]e[^crnsme]$' | grep l

It finds no words fitting that regular expression, so I wasn’t wrong. I still get confused by a yellow letter whose position I can’t quite pin down.