More People Should Try These Three Winning Wordle Starter Words
I think about Wordle way too much. My two-step strategy of beginning with TRAIN and then trying CLOSE as the second word got me to a near-100 winning streak before I blew it a month back, when I guessed VAULT instead of FAULT. Whoops. My FAULT.
So I went back to the Worldle drawing board, deciding I needed a three-starter-word strategy. Usually guessing TRAIN and CLOSE as my first two words gave me a decent number of accurate letters that I just needed to shuffle into the right spots. But sometimes it doesn’t. Then I’m staring blankly at a grid, with four guesses remaining and zero idea what to do.
TRAIN and CLOSE, my starter words, use all 10 of the 10 most commonly used letters in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, according to Reader’s Digest. That’s pretty good, I thought. But where do I go from there, if that gets me nothing? For a while, I tried WHELM, thinking that W, H, L and M were all good consonants to get out of the way. It worked OK, but not great. I was under-WHELMED.
Pumped about ‘UMPED’
But for the past month, I’ve been using this strategy:
- First word…TRAIN
- Second word…CLOSE (sometimes CLOSE gets me nothing, but those are big letters I can’t skip)
- Third word…UMPED. Yes, “UMPED” is a word. I hate reusing the E, but UMPED gets me the last of the five main vowels, three big consonants, and does try the E in a spot
