Wordle May 13, 2023

I could only think of one word that fit after my third guess:

Luckily, that word was the solution. But is it the only possible word? Do I have a very limited vocabulary? Let’s find out.

Once again, I chose to use Unix-grep-style regular expressions to find all words that begin with “ac”, contain an ‘r’, and do not contain any of ’n’, ’e’, ‘k’, ’s’, ’t’, ‘o’

#!/bin/bash
set -eou pipefail

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep '^ac[^neksto][^neksto][^nekstor]$' | grep r

That finds 3 words: “accra”, “acrid”, and “acrux”. “accra” and “acrux” are just weird, so I conclude my vocabulary is still OK.

Now that I’ve written this out, I see that my regular expression could narrow the search further:

#!/bin/bash
set -eou pipefail

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep '^ac[^nekstoac][^neksto][^nekstor]$' | grep r

The letter in the third position can’t be ‘a’ or ‘c’, either.

This better regular expression gets me to “acrid” and “acrux”.

Son of a gun, Acrux is the name of the brightest star in the Southern Cross constellation! Wordle! It’s not just for wasting time, you can learn something!