PyWordle — ncummins1

This addon connects to a PythonAnywhere service that parses through the HTML of Wordle/Wordler to extract your current game state, calculate the best words to guess, and displays the first 5, from most to least likely.

How to use it?

When you're playing a game, open on your "Extensions" drop-down, and click on the PyWordle icon. If you haven't played a word yet, the program will display "roate," which is the mathematically best starting word. To get new hints, click the icon again, and it will calculate the best 5 words for each round!

How does it work?

According to the New York Times, their editors select words daily from the Oxford English Dictionary. Unfortunately, the OED, with over 600,000 words, is behind a paywall, locked only for researchers with license access. To get around this, I generated a list of 2,250,601 possible combinations of 5 letters based on the phonetic and written limitations of English. After cross-referencing with the OED website using an automated Python script, we found 39,513 valid words. Many of these words, however, are archaic, obsolete, and/or outdated. To adjust for this, I used the 2012 Google Ngram dataset, which describes the frequency between the years 1500 and 2012 every word in the Google Books library appears, to calculate a # instances per million words for every valid word. For example, the word "words" appears, on average, 466.08 times for every million English words.

The Wordle rules are simple:
- "absent" letters will never appear
- "present" letters are present, but in the wrong location
- "correct" letters are...correct

Using this as a filter, we can easily determine every possible word for a given game state, and after sorting by the frequency, we can get what word the Editors, who chose the words, most likely selected.

GitHub: nolan-cummins