Hmm... I start with adieu. I try and figure out the vowels. I get nothing with adieu I go with story for the last two vowels.

Done. went to fast, restarted and found a fast clicker

Yup, fast Clicker Easy :

LOUSHKA, I have a friend in Amsterdam who also starts with ADIEU. I start Wordle, and all the other 5-letter word games, with TRIED, LOANS, and CHUMP, using 5 vowels and 10 common consonants. Ill settle for solving wordle in 4 guesses unless the words 5 letters are known before adding CHUMP. These three starting words make Quordle, Octordle, and Sedecordle easier to solve for me.

KnightTime, your first word would have been the correct guess for one of the words in todays Quordle ... chuckle

I start with share

Articles on Wordle say that their internal analysis suggests CRANE as the best starting word, with a high likelihood of getting letters in the right spot. It works pretty well, but I often use STARE or, if Im feeling more consonant-oriented, PRINT. Ive only missed one Wordle since I started playing, but Quordle four simultaneous games stumps me about 1/3 the time. Hurdle is interesting in that it has five successive boards: Boards 2-4 use the previous final word as their start word giving you only 5 more guesses, and the fifth board stacks all four words of the other boards, leaving you only two guesses, but a lot of used-up letters.

I wrote software to help solve wordle. It just needs a list of 5-letter words. In practice there are two lists: one with solution words and a larger list with words it will allow as a guess. The Dutch version has only 865 solution words, the NYT version has 2314 solution words. Unfortunately the latter can only be founf by hacking the script, and that reveals all the future solutions, making it less fun. Trying CRANE tomorrow will give you two out of place hits. The day after tomorrow it will give you two in place and one out-of-plave letters -- if you are more or less in the same time zone as here.

I have 4 starting words that I rotate. Today I started with cameo which gave me the o, followed by unites which gave me the t s. The solution is usually a common word not a PlayBabble weird word. I knew o, t s were in the incorrect position so I started my 3rd guess with sto and solved in 3. Tomorrow I will use my other starter words irate power and see where it goes.

since the lists allowed words and solve word are fixed at least in the NYT version and are published, then solving is a matter of using information theory to hone down the number of possible solutions as quickly as possible. I find that finding determining the best second word is the greatest challenge

I just checked the CRANE claim of the NYT , but their explanation is at least incomplete. There are several words that are better, such as SLATE. Its expectated number of correctly places letters is 0.62, that of CRANE is 0.595

thanks for the tip Mr O. I will try that one this week and see what happens. I am still developing a list of second words based on the information provided by the first word.

Also - I think their choice of CRANE has to do with it providing clues that generate the least number of possible solutions and not necessarily the highest number of correctly placed letters. But both are good strategies.

EZPZ, fast clicks. 8