( New York Times / New York Times )
Tracy Bennett, Wordle and puzzles editor at the New York Times, talks about the celebration around the 1,000th Wordle game and offers insights into how the NYT puzzles are created and played.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. Did you solve Wordle today yet? Solve, five-letter word. That would be an appropriate Wordle word, but no spoilers. Did you know that solving Wordle today lets you join the celebration the New York Times has put together marking the 1,000th Wordle puzzle? Let's play along, and have some Wordle fun with Wordle editor, Tracy Bennett, who joins me now. Hi, Tracy. Welcome to WNYC.
Tracy Bennett: Hi, Brian. Thank you for having me.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you a Wordler? If so, these questions will make sense. Is your streak 1,000-games long? That means getting the five-letter word right in no more than six tries. Do you have a first word that you always use, or do you mix it up? Do you have a hack to make it easier, or even harder? If you want to share or have a question for Tracy Bennett about Wordle, call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Tracy, 1,000 Wordles. Is that since The Times acquired the game, or since it was invented?
Tracy Bennett: Since it was invented. The Times acquired the game in October, and 105 words had run before then. If you have a streak in the 900s, you're basically at the thousand.
Brian Lehrer: Right. 1,000, not quite three years, if it's one a day, right?
Tracy Bennett: Right.
Brian Lehrer: For those who've been living under a rock and don't play themselves, or whose friends aren't posting their Wordle solutions on their social media, can you give people a very succinct intro to the game?
Tracy Bennett: Absolutely. You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. Every guess that you make, you get to see which letters are in the word, and which ones are in the word and in the right place. If you get a green letter, that's in the right place. If it's yellow, you're going to have to move it to a different part of the word. There's a keyboard below that tells you what you've already guessed, so that you can keep trying to find the word. Most times people get it in about four guesses, but every once in a while, you fail.
Brian Lehrer: As someone who has played Wordle a fair amount, that's where the line was for me, between success and failure. You almost always get it at six if you have any-
Tracy Bennett: If you are using strategies.
Brian Lehrer: -learned skills within the game. If I got it in two or three, it was a good day. If I got it in four, it took me till four again. That's probably common.
Tracy Bennett: Although there are some words that will defy strategy. A word that begins with whatever letter, and then O, U, N, D, for example. There are more than six letters that can be in that first slot, so you have to be lucky on that kind of guess.
Brian Lehrer: Wait, what's the--?
Tracy Bennett: If you have blank, O,U,N,D, it's bound, found, round, sound, mound. There are more than six letters that can fit into that first slot.
Brian Lehrer: Right. Those are the most frustrating because there's no skill involved in that. It's just, "Oh, now I have to tick through F, and W, and R.
Tracy Bennett: Yes. Whenever one of those runs, I get complaints.
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Brian Lehrer: Well, as editor, is it your job to pick the day's five-letter word, or does the Wordle bot, an algorithm, do that?
Tracy Bennett: No, I pick the words. I do pick them from the original list that Josh Wardle, who created the game, had laid out for me, and I just scramble--
Brian Lehrer: Wait, the guy who created the game is actually named Wardle?
Tracy Bennett: Wardle, yes. [chuckles] He created the game as a gift to his girlfriend, who's now his wife, and she curated the wordlist. I'm still using that wordlist, plus about 30 words that I've added.
Brian Lehrer: Are you worried that you'll run out of five-letter words?
Tracy Bennett: We will need to consider how to proceed in about 2027. That's when we will have run out of the words that are in the database now, and they are mostly all the good words. We will need to consider what to do next. Maybe we'd be recycling the words, starting over, that sort of thing.
Brian Lehrer: Let's hear from some Wordlers on the occasion of the thousandth day of the puzzle. Phil, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Phil.
Phil: Hi, Brian. My first word is always Soare, S-O-A-R-E. Second word is usually unlit. That uses all 10 letters in Scrabble that'll give you one point. I think if none of those are in the word, it has to be pygmy.
Tracy Bennett: That's great. That's a very good strategy. I do know other people who say they try to eliminate most of the words, or peg most of the words in the first two guesses. Their second guess will contain none of the same letters as the first guess. That is one strategy. It prevents you from ever getting it in two, though, I think, or one.
Brian Lehrer: Because the first word-- oh, if you play that-- but it depends what you get on the first word, right?
Tracy Bennett: Yes, it does. You're right.
Brian Lehrer: For me, I have a number of second words that I would use, depending on which letters in my first word come up.
Tracy Bennett: Right.
Brian Lehrer: That's part of the strategy of Wordle is having, as the caller points out, having a second word, not just a first word, with a lot of common letters.
Tracy Bennett: Yes.
Brian Lehrer: Are there some most common first words, though?
Tracy Bennett: Oh, yes. Well, for a long time, people were trying to peg all of the vowels, so they were using like audio or adieu. Recently, there was a Wordle-bot article that said that actually that's not a winning strategy, and it's better to use a word like trope or trace-
Brian Lehrer: Why?
Tracy Bennett: -that has a mix of consonants and vowels that are common.
Brian Lehrer: Hank, in Fort Lee, you're on WNYC. Hi, Hank.
Hank: Hey, Brian. It's a great puzzle, by the way. My least favorite word is level, just so you know. Most frustrating.
Brian Lehrer: Yes.
Hank: Yes, right? My girlfriend always uses the name of her cat, Basel, as Basel.
Tracy Bennett: Oh.
Hank: My best friend always uses leave. I started with adieu, but got bored, so now I listen to the radio-- I listen to the radio a lot, and I'll listen for a five-letter word. If I'm out in the world and I don't have a radio on, or a tune-in app on, I will look for something, an object, or on a sign, a five letter word. I try to mix it up every day.
Tracy Bennett: That's my favorite strategy.
Hank: There you go.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much.
Hank: Thank you.
Tracy Bennett: I know someone who got a hole-in-one using that strategy. They were at Dairy Queen, and they were looking at the menu, and they decided to enter syrup, and that was the word that day.
Brian Lehrer: Ooh. That's a strategy for fun more than a strategy for minimizing your word count, right?
Tracy Bennett: That's true.
Brian Lehrer: The number of places.
Tracy Bennett: Yes.
Brian Lehrer: Well, I'll disclose, I use arise, usually.
Tracy Bennett: Ooh. That's a good one.
Brian Lehrer: Which I like partly because it's got three vowels, and the R in the second place is common, I think, because you have the combinations of words that could start with ER-
Tracy Bennett: And the E in the last place.
Brian Lehrer: -CR, TR, and the E in the last place, and the S in the second-to-last place, because you don't seem to do plurals, right, words that are just-
Tracy Bennett: That's correct.
Brian Lehrer: -pluralized and end in S, but you have ST, SE, SK, all kinds of words where S could be in the second-to-last place.
Tracy Bennett: Yes. That's a great strategy. I think that's a good word to use.
Brian Lehrer: That's just me. Tracy, in Wappingers Falls, you're on WNYC with Tracy Bennett, the editor of Wordle at The New York Times. Hi, Tracy.
Tracy: Hi.
Tracy Bennett: Hi, Tracy.
Tracy: Can you hear me?
Brian Lehrer: You got a story for us?
Tracy: Yes. Hi.
Brian Lehrer: Yes. Yes, we got you.
Tracy: Yes. My strategy isn't really-- I guess it's sort of a strategy. My seven-year-old son provides the word for me and my mother, and we use it until it's a hole-in-one. It was rodeo, and that was a big day when it was rodeo. Then he gave us bacon, and that was a big day, when it was bacon day.
Brian Lehrer: Wow.
Tracy: We're currently using sport. It's funny to me because his words go with his interests. We can follow what he's into based on the word. He just says, "Use sport." He said that after sport wins, it's going to be robot. I always have to check and make sure it's not already a winning word. That's the deal. We have to check and make sure it hasn't already won. We're still, my mom, my sister and I, all share our scores before we go to bed at night, and we don't live anywhere near each other. It's just a nice way to say goodnight, and share our Wordle scores, and our connections. It's really lovely.
Tracy Bennett: I love this strategy.
Brian Lehrer: Terrific.
Tracy Bennett: It really does highlight that the shareability of this game has been one of the reasons it became so popular, especially during the pandemic when we were all so isolated.
Brian Lehrer: Am I right that you're, on the occasion of the one the 1,000th word, today, you're giving away some prizes?
Tracy Bennett: Yes. You can go to nytimes.com/wordle1000, those are letters, 1000. If you do that, you can see the whole list. We have national brand offerings to Wordlers by Duolingo, Headspace, Uber, Spotify, and a few others. We also have New York City-based offerings that are more tangible. They're all based on Wordle words that I've already run. There's a bagel offering and you can go to Strand and get a special deal if you're one of the first 100 to go in, that sort of thing. There's going to be continuing throughout the next week.
Brian Lehrer: You said 100, I thought, well, here we are almost noon already. You probably gave away all the prizes, but no.
Tracy Bennett: Some of them, but there are still a lot. I would go to that website and see all the things that you can do.
Brian Lehrer: Am I seeing that the prizes are five-letter words, like bagel, or movie?
Tracy Bennett: Yes. That's especially true with the local ones, but there's some also nationally available prizes.
Brian Lehrer: Michael in Dingmans Ferry, Pennsylvania, you're on WNYC. Hi.
Michael: Hi there, Brian. I wanted to talk about Wordle and how it's affecting my relationship with words in general. I've noticed that it takes me mentally through a number of different levels, and I've identified three. One is memory, the other is intuition, and the other is deduction. I noticed that as I move through the different levels with words and trying to find the word, that I have a different sense of what I'm trying to do in finding the word. It challenges these different places in my psychology or my mind.
In memory, it's like I start off with just changing out what I'm putting in. I think of the word as I sit down to play the game. I often try to choose words that have at least two vowels, but also some consonants. I find that I either really get it or I'm so far off. Today's was a really difficult one, but I wound up with four letters and couldn't get the word until I went online and looked for hints.
Brian Lehrer: Wow. Michael, thank you. We've got about 30 seconds left. I want to acknowledge that Wordle was so popular that I guess that's why there are more puzzles in The New York Times recently. If you've given much thought to why we, or many of us as humans, enjoy puzzles so much, we have 30 seconds.
Tracy Bennett: I really think, especially the games that we're offering, there are puzzles that can be solved by busy people, and there are puzzles that people can share on social media and connect with other people and discussing how you did that day on that puzzle. Connections is a huge hit right now. Then we just launched a beta Strands, which is a word search meets Boggle with a theme. It's really fun and people are just really loving these games because they're not easy, but they're challenging. They're not hard-
Brian Lehrer: Possible.
Tracy Bennett: -but they are challenging.
Brian Lehrer: Tracy Bennett, congratulations on finding 1,005-letter words.
Tracy Bennett: Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Good luck, Wordlers. May the bot approve of your choices.
Tracy Bennett: Thank you so much.
Brian Lehrer: Have a great weekend, everyone. I'm Brian Lehrer.
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