Octordle Strategy Guide

Start with the budget

Every Octordle plan comes back to one piece of arithmetic. The eight hidden words are always different, so one guess can solve at most one board. Winning therefore takes at least eight guesses, and with thirteen available you have five spare guesses for the whole game. Each guess that does not solve a board uses one of them.

That changes how you think about openers. In a single-board game a "wasted" scouting guess barely matters. Here, two openers leave three spare guesses for eight boards; three openers leave only two. The goal is to learn enough from a few early guesses that almost every guess after them is a solve.

Best Octordle opening words, by the numbers

We counted the 953 five-letter answers in this game's English answer list and checked which letters appear in the most of them (each letter counted once per word). The top ten, in order, are E, A, R, O, T, S, I, L, N, C. E is in 46.5% of answers, A in 42.6% and R in 38.1%; C, tenth, is still in 23.3%. Then we searched every accepted five-letter guess for sets of words with no repeated letters that cover the most common letters, and tested each set against all 953 answers.

Rare words from the full guess list barely improve on these. The best-scoring pair of ten different letters among all accepted guesses is SOARE + CLINT: it uses exactly the same ten letters as SCORE + LATIN, so it colors the same 3.20 tiles per answer, and it earns only a few more greens (1.24 per answer, against 1.18 for SLATE + CRONY). Rare triples such as OATER + LINDS + CHUMP do no better than TRADE + CHINO + SLUMP, which already covers exactly the fifteen most common letters.

Two things stand out. First, two openers are enough to put at least one colored tile on practically every board: with SLATE + CRONY, every one of the 953 answers lights up somewhere. Second, coverage is not the only thing that counts. SLATE + CRONY covers one less common letter than SCORE + LATIN (Y instead of I) but earns more greens, because it puts S first and E and Y last, where those letters often sit. Greens pin a board down faster than yellows.

A third opener adds roughly 0.8 to 0.9 colored tiles per board and lifts greens, but it costs one of your five spare guesses. Use three when you like a slow, safe start; use two when you trust yourself to solve with fewer clues.

Letter facts that help mid-game

• S starts words, it rarely ends them. S is the most common first letter (16.4% of answers), but only 3.1% of answers end in S. Plural-looking guesses are poor bets.
• E is the most common last letter at 20.0%, ahead of T (11.9%), R (9.3%) and Y (8.1%).
• Two vowels is normal. 60.9% of answers have exactly two of A, E, I, O and U; 29% have one and 10% have three. Only one answer has none, and it uses Y instead.
• Some letters are almost certainly in the puzzle. Across eight boards, E appears on at least one board in 99.3% of games, A in 98.8% and R in 97.9%. J, Q, X and Z each turn up in only about 8 to 10% of games.

When to stop exploring

After your openers, look for boards where only one answer fits. Those are free solves, and every solve also writes one more row of information onto the other unsolved boards. A good rule: once your openers are in, each guess should be a word that could be the answer on at least one board. You lose very little information that way, because a five-letter answer guess still tests five letters on seven other boards.

Spend a spare guess on pure exploring only when several boards are stuck at the same time and one word could help all of them, for example a word that tests the two or three untried common letters left on the keyboard.

Choosing the next board

Solve in order of certainty. Compare two boards after SCORE and LATIN:

The first board is a guaranteed solve, so play it now. The second has five candidates (BRIDE, DRIVE, PRIDE, PRIZE and RIDGE), so leave it; the solves you play on other boards may well eliminate some of them for free. When no board is certain, pick the board with the fewest candidates, and among those, the guess that also tests useful letters elsewhere.

Repeated letters

About 30% of answers (288 of 953) have a repeated letter, and 123 of them have the same letter twice in a row. Across eight boards you should expect two or three such words per game, and 94.5% of games include at least one. The letters that repeat most often are E, O, L, A, T and R.

Remember how the colors work: greens are matched first, then yellows from left to right, and a gray copy of a letter only means there is no further copy. If a board has a word like _ _ E _ _ and is running out of new letters, a doubled E or O is a sensible thing to test. If you see a board stuck with three or four greens and no letters left to try, a repeated letter is often the missing piece.

Reading the split keys

Each key is split into eight blocks: boards 1 and 2 across the top, then 3 and 4, 5 and 6, and 7 and 8 at the bottom. Use the keyboard to answer two quick questions before every guess:

• Is this letter dead everywhere? A key that is gray in all eight blocks can go out of your thinking entirely.
• Where is this letter still alive? A key with one yellow block and seven gray ones tells you the letter belongs to one specific board, which is a strong hint about which board a guess containing it will help.

Blocks of solved boards stop changing, so late in the game look only at the blocks of the boards still open.

The endgame

Count before every guess: unsolved boards versus guesses left. While guesses left are greater than boards left, you still have slack. When they are equal, every guess must be a solve.

When a board is down to two candidates, guess one of them. If it is wrong, the other one is your next solve, and you have only spent the one spare guess. When a board has three to five candidates, look for a candidate that gives a different color pattern for each of the others. On the five-word board above, PRIDE does exactly that:

So PRIDE either solves that board or tells you exactly which word it is, at the cost of at most one extra guess.

Playing by stricter rules

Our Octordle has no hard-mode switch at the moment, but you can set your own rules for a tougher game. Two that work well on eight boards:

• After your openers, every guess must be a possible answer on at least one board.
• No third opener: you get two scouting words, then you must start solving.

Both rules take away your safety net, so track your results in the statistics and compare. For the counts behind this guide, see the word list page.