Allow me to brag: I actually started playing Wordle before it was sold to that soulless corporation, The New York Times (NYT), i.e. I Wordled before it was cool. After he deleted Minecraft from his phone two years ago, my high school friend Nick and I would stay up until midnight and wait for the new word to drop. I would always get the answer before he did, without using a ‘strat’ (as he would say) because I’m just so smart and sexy, and also an English major. You can learn a lot about people from the types of words they guess. For example, on Jan. 24, 2022, my dear friend Nicholas guessed “IRATE,” “OUGHT,” “BLOWS,” “CLOCK,” and “LOOKY” (hilarious) before finally guessing the correct word “KNOLL.” Hypothesis proven: maybe if Nick touched grass more, he would have known what a knoll is.
The game was very popular back then, even if I didn’t know it at the time. However, I never would have guessed the insane surge in fame that Wordle has experienced in the past two years since it moved to the NYT. It has spawned countless variations, is played by billions of people and even has its own WordleBot that can analyze your guesses and compare you to other players. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen dazed-out classmates playing Wordle during a lecture, fruitlessly trying to escape the drudgery of Milton or Beckett, only for the word to be “BOOKS.” It’s truly unavoidable: the game’s simplicity and accessibility has captivated people worldwide, or Wordle-wide.
Okay, now it’s time for me to address the headline. Many people online will tell you that the best first word to use for Wordle is something that uses a lot of common letters, like “ARISE” or “STARE,” since a lot of words tend to have the letters A, S, T, and E. But the truth is that one word trumps all of those sensible, benign starter words—and that word is “PENIS.”
Think about it. Every letter in “PENIS” is different, meaning that you get to cast your net a little wider while setting up for your next guess. According to Wheel of Fortune, the most common letters that are always given away in the final puzzle are RSTLNE, and “PENIS” uses three of those letters!! The beautiful anticipation I experience every day as I think, “Maybe today, today could be the day where I see the word ‘PENIS’ lit up in beautiful green squares,” is something that even Freud would struggle to define. Not envy, my friend, but delight.
I’m only saying all of this so I can implore you to follow suit: use “PENIS” as your starter word, too! Join me and the legion of almost two million unique, extraordinary Wordle players who do the exact same thing. Don’t you want to know what it feels like to attempt to hide your computer screen from other people in the Deece at 9 a.m. so they don’t judge you for having a word for genitalia on the same device you use to email your professors? I guess it’s a good thing that Connections prepares the words for you.