For those of you new to Quordle, a brief explanation of the game can be found here. The basic idea is that there are four five-letter words, and you make guesses that apply to all four; the program tells you when a letter is in each word and if it is in the correct position. To succeed you must identify all four words in nine guesses or less. My first Quordle article had a discussion on how to use letter frequencies in five-letter words to choose starting or seed words.

If you do not get all four words in nine guesses, we call it “chumping.” The number of words you don’t get in nine guesses determines the level of chumping (single, double, etc.). There have been a number of triple-chumps, but no Glib has quadruple-chumped in a posted score, although there was a claim of doing that in a practice round (I won’t name names). The Hyperbole wondered (paraphrasing here) if a quadruple chump would be likely or, alternatively, hard to get, if you made a legitimate attempt, i.e., don’t put letters where you already know they aren’t allowed, but use bad seed words. My thought was that perhaps if your seed words were bad enough, it might pretty much guarantee a quadruple chump even if you were trying not to lose (other than choosing bad seed words).

Not wanting to have a question like that go unanswered, I set out to find bad seed words and see If they ensured a chump. For reference, my standard seed words are CARET/LOINS/DUMPY, although if the first word or two gets enough hits, I may not use all three. To find good seed words I looked for letters with high frequencies in five-letter words, and also words that have those letters in the positions they are more likely to occur. The dictionary I used to find the 5197 five-letter words in these analyses was one I found on the University of Michigan website.

For bad seed words, of course we want low frequencies. The only restrictions are that the seed words must be real words recognized by Quordle, and the seed words cannot have repeat letters, since that would be wasting a letter. This latter requirement might be debatable, since using a letter more than once might help find its exact position, which is helpful in pinning down the correct word. But for this attempt, that’s the rule I will use.

Without going into detail, the seeds I came up with are QUICK/ZLOTY/WAXEN (yes, ZLOTY, the Polish currency, is accepted by Quordle). The order is in increasing frequency, i.e., the first seed QUICK has the lowest frequency, etc. This combination has both overall and exact-position frequencies that are about 75% of my standard seed words, although the much of it comes from the third seed WAXEN, which has the common letters A, E, and N.

The real test is how these “bad” seeds do in actual use. I played six practice games using QUICK/ZLOTY/WAXEN. Although QUICK does not do nearly as well as CARET, nor does QUICK/ZLOTY do as well as CARET/LOINS, I found that there was still enough information in four of the six games to not need the third seed to get at least one word correct. In one of those cases I never even needed to use WAXEN. My scores ranged from 18 to 27, with an average of 23, and there were no chumps. (The numerical score is determined by how many guesses it takes to get each of the four words; e.g., if you get the four words in the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 8th guesses, your score is 22. A word that is not guessed by the ninth guess gets a score of 100. A “perfect” quadruple chump would have a score of 400.)

My take-away from this is that even with bad seed words, if you try your best to find the correct words, you generally can complete the puzzle in nine guesses or less.

Trashy encouraged me to find the complete Wordle word list, from which Quordle words are supposedly taken. I found them (2317 words) and will report my findings in another article.