Since many of my regular commenters are intent on talking about their Wordle scores in the comments, you can now use this thread rather than my Topic Suggestions. Please put the following phrase at the top of every comment to avoid spoilers (fresh comments appear on the homepage, so people can see them even if they are not reading this post).

“To all WORDLE fans
We are discussing today’s WORDLE puzzle.
If you do not want to see the answer,
then please avert your eyes.
——————————”

For those who may not know, Wordle is a popular word puzzle created by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle in 2013. After it became popular it was purchased by the New York Times, who now hosts the game. The game has become popular partly because people like publishing their solutions on social media. The game has also provoked a lot of questions. There is no evidence to suggest that playing Wordle makes you smarter, and we now have a lot of research that shows that puzzle games like this make you better at the specific game, but does not boost general intelligence. However, the game may make people feel smart. That’s because it is easy to underestimate how quickly word options can be eliminated, and therefore how quickly we can whittle down the options to the correct answer, so we feel really smart when we get it.

Math nerds have also used the game as an opportunity to teach about entropy and information theory. How much information do you get out of each guess? What is the optimal starter word? If you played a statistically perfect game, what would your score distribution be?

Which country has the best Wordle players? Well, if Twitter is a fair indication then it’s Sweden. What’s the best state? North Dakota.

Enjoy.