I wanted to figure out the best five-letter word to use as a starting word in WORDLE.
I grabbed a list of the supposed 3,000 most common words in English. I intentionally did not grab the actual word list which WORDLE uses, that felt a bit unfair, but regardless I have to imagine my top-rated guesses are probably in this list.
This code reads that list, filters it down to just the five-letter words (483 of them, from here on referred to as the "eligible words"), and then scores each word.
Each word gets a score based on the letters that appear in the word. Part of the score is based on the frequency of each letter in the eligible words. For example, 'A' is the most commonly used letter in the eligible words--it appears a total of 213 times--so an 'A' gets 213 points.
The other part of the score is based on the frequency of the letter in that position within the eligible words. For example, 'S' is the most frequent letter used in the first position (80 words), so when it appears in the first position it gets a bonus of 80 * 3 (I use 3 as an arbitrary multiplier here).
Additionally, a letter's score is reduced each additional time that it appears in a word, since knowing which letters appear in the answer is valuable information and without knowing ahead of time that a letter appears multiple times it is probably best to avoid duplicate letters in the initial guess. So each additional time that a letter appears I have arbitrarily divided that letter's score by 4 times the number of times it has previously appeared.
Here are the top 30 starting guesses based on using this algorithm, along with their score:
TRACE: 2085
SHARE: 2068
STARE: 2049
ARISE: 1982
TRADE: 1938
SHORE: 1918
STORE: 1899
SCALE: 1879
RAISE: 1874
SHINE: 1868
SLICE: 1868
SHADE: 1864
CHASE: 1864
SAUCE: 1860
SHAPE: 1838
SPACE: 1836
STONE: 1824
STAGE: 1822
SLAVE: 1809
STATE: 1807
PRICE: 1807
SHAKE: 1804
THOSE: 1796
PHASE: 1793
PLATE: 1785
STAKE: 1785
SCORE: 1775
WRITE: 1770
REACT: 1764
TRIBE: 1763
Before I undertook this effort, I speculated that STARE was a very good starting guess. And according to this scoring methodology, that is true -- it ended up in third place.