9 letter Wordle strategy
Multi-board play is a budgeting problem. This guide covers how the 9-letter edition changes that budget and where its traps are.
Count your spare guesses
Subtract unsolved boards from guesses left. That number is your margin. A guess that solves a board keeps the margin; a guess that solves nothing lowers it by one.
The starting margin is small at every size:
- 1 board: 6 guesses, 5 spare.
- 4 boards: 9 guesses, 5 spare.
- 16 boards: 21 guesses, 5 spare.
- 32 boards: 37 guesses, 5 spare.
- 64 boards: 70 guesses, 6 spare.
- 128 boards: 135 guesses, 7 spare.
What nine letters changes
Each guess shows you nine letters, more than a third of the alphabet. Clues arrive quickly and near-identical answers are rare. The limit is your own vocabulary: finding any valid nine-letter word that uses what you know takes longer than reading the board.
Word families
Nine-letter answers are told apart by their stems. ADDICTION, AFFECTION, ATTENTION, DETENTION, INFECTION, INJECTION, INTENTION and INVENTION all end the same way, and compounds share halves: HEARTACHE, HEARTBEAT, HEARTBURN, HEARTFELT, HEARTLAND, HEARTLESS.
Once the shared part is green, list the stems you know that fit the yellow letters. There are seldom more than two or three candidates, so entering the likeliest one is usually better than a test word.
When to stop opening
Two openers with 15 different letters put clues on almost every board. After that, find a board whose answer is certain and enter it: you solve that board and add a row of clues to all the others.
At zero margin, every remaining guess has to solve a board for a full clear.
A scanning routine
Go through the boards in the same order each time and hide solved boards once the grid starts to thin out. Clear what is certain first, then return to the boards with few clues. The answers you entered in between may have settled them.