awaken
Well-known member
STARE
MOUND if none of those letters hit
These are my first two words as well. I am perhaps wrongly assuming that the words will be selected at random and my strategy is for my first words to use the most common letters in the dictionary
https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfrequencies.html
I've been using STARE, MOUND, PICKY since that comes pretty close to using the letters in order of popularity. I'm thinking about making small changes to STARE, POUND, FILMY.
But I am now thinking that the words are chosen by NYT knowing that we know the most common letters, so they choose common words with less common letters to make it challenging - kind of like how Wheel of Fortune does with the final puzzle when they spot contest the STRLNE. That should be helpful but it isn't. So what then becomes a viable alternate strategy?