Words, Wordle, and Intuition
Arvind Passey
28 February 2025
Those who know what the Wordle is about will also know that one gets only six chances to reach that 5-letter word that the creators of this game have decided for the day. Those of you who will now mutter, ‘That seems easy enough’ have overlooked that the Oxford English Dictionary estimates the number of words in current use to be around 170,000, with an additional 47,000 obsolete words.
For those insisting on correctness of statistics, the Official Scrabble Dictionary has about 9,000 words but the Free Dictionary lists more than 158,000 words with five letters. Imagine, therefore, the massive size of decision-making involved when asked to find the right word for the day in just five chances. No clues given. No directions to refine your powers of discernment. It is entirely up to you to know if the word is one with double letters or triple letters or the number of vowels it might have or if less used alphabets like Q and Y too are there to make the day that bit more difficult.
What do I do?
I begin with ‘adieu’ for reasons that I cannot explain except that this word helps me find out the vowels in the word, if any. Nearly, because O is not included in this word.
What next?
I knock on the doors of my intuition.
What? Intuition? What happened to good old logic? Reasoning?
Hmmm… what do most of us do when we search for someone to help us out of a quandary? We look for a good friend… and there are plenty of friends around. This list includes one’s parents, spouse, relatives, acquaintances, and strangers. And the usual friend who loves sharing sleazy pictures on WhatsApp. Then there is another friend that most people never think about: Intuition.
Trust your instincts. It is often said that instincts tend to be based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. Not surprised then that even Albert Einstein once called intuition the ‘only real valuable thing.’ Most times when the truth is obscure or when the right direction is covered in thick layers of reasoning that acts like an impenetrable fog, intuition comes to the rescue. ‘Intuition is seeing with the soul,’ wrote Dean Koontz.
Now if you are wondering what intuition has to do with words and Wordle, let me add that solving the daily Wordle has convinced me of the way intuition knocks down all walls that reasoning tries to build to reveal the word that must come next. Writers know this extremely well. They stare at a blank screen or page until the right words begin their march in an orderly fashion. Writers watch with fascination as they gawk at words dragging the plot, theme, and sometimes even characters and dialogues in full view. The writer has no option but to notice this parade and get down to the task of tracing them all out on the blank canvas in front. If he does not, this GPS for the soul screams at the writer to start. It does the same when a critical aspect is overlooked and screams at the writer to make a U-turn. It is similar with Wordle. Or Sudoku. Or even for artists and anyone else who is attempting to create or find answers. Scientists too are not left out. These goliaths of reasoning hardly ever give credit to their intuition but know there is something that has hand-held their walk into and through whatever it is that they are doing. Jonas Salk did write about intuition telling ‘the thinking mind where to look next.’
A gamer is like a spy. So is the one who solves Wordle. I have often got irrevocably lost in the mire of wrong choices whenever I have not listened to my intuition while solving the daily Wordle. I agree with Michael Burke when he tells us that ‘good instincts usually tell you what to do before your head has figured it out.’ There is a lot more that intuition does, and I am happy whenever it visits me.
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Arvind Passey
Written on 28 February 2025
