Why your usual Wordle strategy isnt working today, according to a linguistics professor

Date:
Fri, 11 Mar 2022 17:05:44 +0000

Description:
We spoke to a linguistics professor to find out why Wordle puzzle #256 was so tough.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Other Wordle tips

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If youve found todays Wordle answer more difficult than most, youre not
alone. Puzzle #256 has proven so tough, in fact, that weve been live-blogging the internets reactions to the latest headache-inducing five-letter term.

But why is today's answer proving trickier than others? TechRadar spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UKs University of Warwick, to find out the science behind the struggle.

Naturally, well be divulging the solution to todays puzzle below, so turn back now if youre committed to weathering the latest Wordle alone.

Ok, here goes. Todays Wordle answer is WATCH . Yep, little old WATCH by all accounts, a fairly simple, universally-accepted noun and verb. Dont worry, were kicking ourselves too. But Professor Voice explains that there is some genuine reasoning behind why you (and we) may not have been so quick on the draw this week.

[In your live blog ] you've already talked about _ATCH as a kind of trap.
This is an example of an n-gram, i.e. a group of letters of a length (n) that commonly cluster together. So this is an n-gram with a length of four
letters: a quadrigram, Professor Voice tells us.

Using [this] Project Gutenberg data, it's interesting to note that _ATCH
isn't listed as one of the most common quadrigrams in English overall, but
the [same] data considers words of all lengths, rather than just the five letters Wordle is limited to. I don't know of any corpus exclusively composed of common 5 letter words, but it might be the case that _ATCH happens to be particularly productive for that length. Understand your quadrigrams

The other thing to mention, Professor Voice adds, would be that the
quadrigram _ATCH is made up of smaller n-grams, like the bigram AT, which is extremely common in English. So we're seeing a lot of common building blocks in one word, which means that sorting individual letters might not be narrowing down people's guesses as much as it would with other words.

So there you have it. WATCH may in fact be too simple a word, after all so much so that your usual method of deduction doesnt account for the myriad possible solutions.

Here's hoping tomorrow's answer is a little more... difficult?



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/why-your-usual-wordle-strategy-isnt-working-tod ay-according-to-a-linguistics-professor/


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