What's a Five-Letter Word for Routine?
What's the best way to play Wordle?
I have a very strict morning routine. I get up, take Brownie (my seven-year-old Shorkie) for a walk, feed him, shower, cook breakfast (one egg over-medium, sausage, toast), get the coffee going, drink a glass of Metamucil while I open the curtains to let the sun in, and then play Connections and Wordle while I eat. Having a strict routine alleviates some of the anxiety that always threatens to weasel its way into my mind. Because of this, mornings are anxiety-free. If the routine is broken, it’s difficult for me to jump into writing and I feel a bit off all day.
I also have a strict routine for how I play the New York Times games. When I open up Connections, I always shuffle first, because I’m convinced that the editors purposefully set the words in an order that is misleading. I have no evidence of this, but shuffling make me feel like I’ve got a leg up on their trickery. When I play Wordle, I always start with the same word, a word that has a particular power over me – DREAM.
I am fascinated by the act of dreaming. I think it’s a really fucking weird thing we do that we don’t pay enough attention to. Every night we slip into a coma and appear to be dead for eight hours while our mind hallucinates completely convincing worlds and scenarios for us to experience.
Why?
Why to all of it.
Why do we dream? Why are we fooled by the dream? Why does it feel so real when we’re inside a dream?
When we’re in a dream, we accept that it is real. Likewise, when we’re awake, we accept that this is real. But the only difference I can find between the waking life and the world of dreams is consistency. The waking world is consistent. Dreams are not.
Still, there is so much similarity, I do think it’s entirely possible that, as Phillip Jeffries said in Twin Peaks, “we live inside a dream.”
Anyway, I start with DREAM. It’s a helpful Wordle word, anyway. Five different letters, two vowels. Not bad. And if none of the letters hit, I go with GHOST. Five new separate letters, plus another vowel, and also your “s” and “t” which are commonly used letters.
On June 14, none of my DREAM letters hit and when I went with GHOST, everything went green! I got it on the second try. How wonderful. But I knew I’d have to replace that second word, which messes with my routine. I didn’t like that at all. I didn’t know where to start so I took my concerns to social media and asked you kind folk what your favorite words to use are.
The response was overwhelming. I was surprised not only at how many of us play Wordle as part of our morning routine but also how many of you have an unchanging first word, like I do. In fact, about two million people play Wordle on a daily basis. And many of you also use the same words others do (a fact I’m sure the New York Times is well aware of). It’s a cultural phenomenon. And a strange one, at that, because we’re essentially excited to wake up and take a test every day.
Fun fact about Wordle – it was created by a software engineer by the name of Josh (wait for it) Wardle. Wardle made Wordle. The guy grew up on an organic livestock farm in South Wales and started working at Reddit in 2011, where he devised some clever social experiments like The Button, which was a just button placed next to a sixty-second timer that would refresh every time someone pushed it. The Button appeared on Reddit on April Fools’ Day in 2015 and it did not zero-out until June 5 that year.
Wardle designed our game in 2021, and for a while he just played it at home with his partner. It was such a simple idea, discover a five-letter word. But it’s still challenging. In the English language there are more than 158,000 five-letter words, after all. And there is a certain satisfaction that comes with the solution that gives you a warm, cozy feeling.
Wardle made his game publicly available in October 2021. The Times saw the potential right away and snatched it up from him three months later for seven figures. A smart move, considering Wordle was played 4.8 billion times in 2023 – that’s 4.8 billion clicks on a newspaper’s website, a fine figure to lure potential advertisers.
For those of us who have made Wordle part of our daily routine, we choose our first words very carefully.
According to those who responded to my post, a great many of you choose the words ADIEU or AUDIO, simply for the number of vowels. I don’t abide by this at all. Where is the whimsy in that? You’re hunting vowels like a rich tourist hunts quail that were placed in a small field just for him to find. Where’s the challenge? Likewise for SLATE, which was already outed for being the most strategic word to start with.
Why not add a sense of randomness, like Tom Kerrigan, who always picks a word from the USA Today crossword puzzle? Or you could go dark, like Ron Hogan does when he tries DEATH every day. Or Stephanie Zavas, who chooses CHAOS. On the flipside, Stephanie Tetter goes with PIOUS.
I like the way Kristy Poor plays, with her choice of ABOVE first and then BELOW. Laura Young switched to IRONY in January, after Trump returned to the White House. She should be friends with Janice Laben, who uses GRIEF because it’s “a nod to the times.” Barbara McIntyre, a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, who has also reviewed my last several books, goes with SPITE, but added, “I’d prefer revenge but it’s too long.” Should I be concerned?
For the record, after GHOST hit, I retired the word and chose PLINK instead. I’m not satisfied with it, though. It doesn’t tickle me the way GHOST used to. I’m thinking of switching to FUNKY or maybe CRIME to stay on brand.
If only it were a bit simpler. I can think of several four-letter words I’d prefer to use instead.