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1 year ago
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What's your strategy to solving GuessWord?
In our popular puzzle, players have six chances to guess a five-letter word - but it could be one of thousands.
The player's goal is to whittle down that list as fast as possible and clever strategies can reduce the number of guesses and time they need to land on the solution.
Last week we revealed the average player solves the puzzle in 2 minutes 40 seconds, and the leaderboards indicate some five percent can solve in under a minute.
One basic approach that can help is to think about how the number of vowels in your starting word.
Starting words with a larger number of vowel will enable the plater to rule out more five-letter words faster
The word 'AUDIT' contains three vowels, enabling the player to confirm or eliminate large numbers of words and solve the puzzle as quickly as possible. Starting words with fewer vowels are less like to whittle down the list of possible five-letter words
GuessWord is unique from other interpretations of the five-letter puzzle because it provides players with a starting letter which can appear anywhere within the mystery word.
While that's an advantage in some senses, it also forces the player to think a little harder about which word they use to start the game.
One well-established principle is that because vowels feature more prominently in English words, players would be wise to rule out as many as possible early on.
After all, GuessWord is a game of elimination, so the faster players can eliminate words, the faster they can solve the problem. Knowing which vowels do and do not feature in the mystery word will therefore guide them to the solution faster.
For example, on Friday's GuessWord players knew knew from the start the letter 'D' featured somewhere in the mystery word.
A starting word like 'AUDIT' with three vowels is likely to be much more helpful than a word like 'DODGY', for example, with one.
Eliminating the possibility that consonants appear in the word is useful, but tends to rule out fewer words.
The average GuessWord player takes around 2 minutes and 40 seconds to solve the puzzle
DailyMail.com this month released its FREE new puzzles page, loaded with number and word puzzles, quizzes and crosswords.
GuessWord has rapidly emerged as a fan-favorite, with readers across the country racing to identify the six-letter mystery word in record time.
The top 5 percent of players complete the game in less than a minute.
On average just 1 percent of players are able to complete the puzzle in under 30 seconds. On the other end of the spectrum, only 7 percent need more than six minutes.
Do you have any winning strategies? Email neirin.gray@mailonline.com to share them.
English (US)