Science has determined the worst Wordle starting word
Global News
Wordle's worst starting word is probably a word you've never come across in your life...until now.
By now, you have probably figured out your favourite word to use when starting a game of Wordle.
However, thanks to science and TikTok, we also have some contenders for the worst word to play first.
TikTok user @crvlwanek, whose name is Chris, created an entire computer script to figure out what the best and worst words are to open a game of Wordle.
(Wordle, for the uninitiated, is a one-play-per-day deduction game that asks players to figure out a five-letter word. Players receive a maximum of six guesses to complete the word. It’s become an absolute sensation since it was released online in Nov. 2020, and was recently bought by the New York Times.)
According to Mashable, Chris was inspired by user @linguisticdiscovery, who was posting about the best and worst starting words — but wanted concrete, scientific proof about the best opening word.
His journey to Wordle truth began when Chris went into the game’s back-end code and found the entire list of possible daily words.
He found out that the worst word to start with is “xylyl” — a word taken from the world of chemistry that is defined by Merriam-Webster as “any of several isomeric monovalent radicals C8H9 derived from the three xylenes by removal of a hydrogen atom.”