Tabula Rasa

You may choose ocean as your first guess, for example, and when you touch the Enter key the backgrounds of four of those letters fill in gray. The other is e and its background is now yellow. E is in the word you seek but not in the middle, as it is in ocean. You study this graphic information, and carefully devise a second guess. You have known since pre-K that in English there are five and a half vowels and 20.5 consonants. Vowels grease the skids, so a useful second guess will include other vowels. Try suite. Enter. A gray background fills in behind the s and the u. The t turns yellow. The e in its new position remains yellow, but the i is green. You go off into a confidence-rattling realm of digraphs and rogue “y”s. You think “realm” might be the target word someday. You sober up. If succeeding in two is just a luckshot feat (I did it nine times last year), the third guess is in the insight zone. With a nervous pen, I list letters that remain available, and I get out my digraph chart, featuring thirty-some items like “bl,” “th,” “tr,” “sh,” “gn,” “sl,” and “cr.” I stare at suite. With that i green in the middle, the t and e yellow, I try tried. Enter. The i and the e are now green and so is the t! At this point—the fourth guess—Wordle often seems to be playing itself. Statistically, about half of my Wordlequests end in four. After tried, I try thief, and the five squares in the fourth row turn green and wiggle.