What is the best Absurdle guess?

Absurdle is a five-letter word game variant of the famous New York Times Wordle, created by the coder known as gntm. Absurdle is also a much harder version than the original, as with each attempt to find the secret word, the answer changes to make the game as long as possible. It is an interesting challenge for players who have already solved the Wordle of the day.

The way Absurdle works creates some specific scenarios that set it apart from the original. Its natural difficulty allows the player to try as many times as they want until they get the correct word, unlike Wordle where there are only six attempts. The participation of an AI in the game to choose the secret word according to certain rules creates a situation where it is possible to repeat the same game several times if you make the same attempts in the same order. At this point, it doesn’t even make sense to play the game that way, so Absurdle encourages players to use different words and has even implemented a button that tries a random word.

So far, the most optimized matches are believed to contain four tries to get the right answer. There are possibly thousands of cases where this happens like the one below taken from the official detailed explanation page.

How to choose the first word

There are a few possible strategies for choosing the first word when playing Absurdle. You can choose a random word to ensure the rest of the match will be unlike any you’ve played before. But let’s talk about the best word choices to get the final answer as soon as possible.

Statistically

When you choose a word, Absurdle’s AI will calculate which answer will leave you with the most words left that could be the right answer. And there is one word you should choose if you want to narrow down the right answers as much as possible.

• ARISE

According to Maxwell Pelic, a web developer and graphic designer who created a bot to play Absurdle. After using the word ‘ARISE’, you will have only 168 possible answers out of a list of over 2,315, making it one of the best words to start with.

Vowels

As with Wordle, using as many vowels quickly will also narrow down the right answers in Absurdle. So almost whenever you try a word with four vowels Absurdle will say at least one of them is present in the correct word. With this strategy you skip rounds in which you would not find any letter present in the correct word, greatly reducing your next options. Some of the best words for this strategy are:

• ADIEU
• AUDIO
• AULOI
• AUREI
• LOUIE
• MIAOU
• OUIJA
• OURIE
• URAI

The anagram strategy

The purpose of this strategy is simple: use as many letters as possible on your first four attempts, 20 letters. That way you will find out which ones will be present in the correct answer and there will be a few letters that could appear. It’s a strategy that takes many tries, but finding the right word is almost like figuring out an anagram. A good set of words with 20 different letters is:

• SWORD
• FAINT
• CHEVY
• PLUMB

It is possible to go further with this strategy and use 25 letters in a combination of five words. Although some of the words used are quite strange, they are valid in Wordle. Here they are:

• BLING
• TRECK
• WAQFS
• JUMPY
• VOZHD

It’s important to note that, when using this strategy, the order you guess makes a difference in what the final answer will be because of the deterministic nature of Absurdle’s AI, which changes the correct answer as you guess. So if you start with a word that contains the letter ‘A’ like ‘WAQFS’, it will say there is no letter ‘A’ in the correct answer. But if you leave ‘WAQFS’ as your fourth try, it will probably say there is an ‘A’ in the correct word.