Wordle, March 1, 2024

I solved Wordle™ brand video game, puzzle number 986 without computerized help, but I made a silly 3rd guess. I wondered if the solution word was the only word available after my fourth guess.

After my fourth guess, I can see that:

1. none of the letters ‘c’, ‘a’, ’n’, ’e’, ’s’, ‘h’, ‘p’, ‘i’, ’m’ appear in the solution.
2. An ‘r’ appears in columns 3 or 5.
3. A ’t’ appears in colums 1 or 4
4. ‘o’ does not appear in columns 3 or 5
5. ’t’ and ‘r’ don’t interfere with each other

This leads to a moderately long regular expression.

#!/bin/bash
set -eou pipefail

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep -E '^(tor[^caneshpimrt][^caneshpimotr]|to[^caneshpimotr][^caneshpimrt]r|[^caneshpimrt]ort[^caneshpimot]|[^caneshpimrt]o[^caneshpimotr]tr)$'

The litte shell script above outputs a single word, “forty”, which is the solution to Wordle 986. Alternation does constrain the answer when you’ve got yellow letters to include, and my fifth guess was in fact the only solution to the problem at that point.