Cheating at Wordle Like a Hacker

These day almost everyone on Twitter seems to be playing the word game Wordle, including me. You’ve probably seen many people around you sharing images like this one:

Most of the time the 5-letter words you have to guess are pretty easy, but occasionally there are words that are quite uncommon (at least for non-native speakers like me), that encourage to cheat in order to figure them out.

While there are all sorts of ways to cheat at Wordle, I think the most hackerish approach is to simply use a tool like grep on your English dictionary. Imagine that we’re looking for words that start with r and end with t. Now we can quickly find all such words to come up with our next guess:

$ grep ^r...t$ /usr/share/dict/words
react
rebut
refit
remit
reset
right
rivet
roast
robot
roost

That’s some pretty basic grep usage here - we’re basically using a regexp that will match all whole 5-letter words starting with r and ending with t. And that’s it.¹ No more googling for queries like “5 letter words that end with t”. The Unix tools are the Way! Keep hacking!

1. I think that dictionary file is installed by default on most Linux distros. ↩