The daily word game Wordle has taken the world by storm recently, which gives the player six chances to guess the correct valid word comprised of five white letters in the classic Helvetica sans serif typeface — and the clues of yellow and green letter tiles convey hints towards guessing the correct answer…
Places Around the World Which Are Best at Solving Wordle
…but as Wordle is played all over the world and not just in the United States, which countries and cities around the world are where Wordle is best solved?
To find out the answer to that question, 195,248 tweets with hashtag #wordle were pulled using Twitter API. The game score from 142,669 tweets was successfully extracted. To qualify, the score presented as a fraction — for example, 3/6 or 5/6 — and the grid of colored squares were searched.
The rare cases where fraction and image contradicted each other were dropped. Also, 2,729 messages on Twitter with a score of X/6 were also dropped, which meant that the puzzle was not solved with six guesses and kept only numeric scores.
The worldwide average number of guesses is 3.919 based on 139,940 messages on Twitter. Of course, only tweeted results were counted.
Getting the user location and grouped the data by country, state, and city was attempted. At the country level, only the countries with at least 50 messages on Twitter were saved — in both cities rankings globally and within the United States — with at least 25 messages on Twitter.
The data were collected in January 2022.
I have been given express written permission to use the illustrations and the verbatim text from this article from WordTips of the cities and countries in the world, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia where Wordle is best played. While WordTips has endeavored to ensure the information provided is accurate and current, it cannot guarantee it. Neither WordTips nor The Gate accept liability for the information which is presented in this article.
Which Countries and Cities Around the World is Wordle Solved Best?
First, you heard somebody muttering at their phone on the train.
“Spoke. Stuck. Stake. Sleke – smeke – is sneke a word?”
Soon, it got onto your computer. Well, your Twitter feed. In its first two months, Wordle was mentioned on Twitter 1.7 million times. And that doesn’t include those countless captionless result grids, at first enigmatic and soon tiresome. Green and yellow and totally excluding you from the club. What was this strange phenomenon everybody was talking about?
And then, the think-pieces started. Good heavens, the think-pieces! So you read one. But you needed more context. Just one go. But playing Wordle once, you realize how much better you could do a second time. Your techniques are, frankly, burgeoning. A shame not to try again tomorrow. Maybe you’ll be one of the Wordle greats.
Great: there’s a good starting word. But can you be the best? WordTips loves Wordle so much that we even made a Wordle word finder to help everyone practice. But with a whole day to wait until the next Wordle comes out, we decided to spend some time analyzing Twitter data to find the countries, states, and cities with the best Wordle averages in the world.
Key Findings
- Canberra, Australia is the global city with the best Wordle average: 3.58 guesses.
- Sweden is the world’s best country at Wordle, with an average of 3.72.
- The US is ranked #18 in the world for Wordle, with a national average of 3.92.
- The American state with the best Wordle average is North Dakota (3.65).
- The US city with the best Wordle scores is Saint Paul, Minnesota, with an average of 3.51.
Sweden is the Country That Solves Wordle the Fastest
Swede. There’s a solid five-letter word! And Swedes are the best Wordle players in the world. Sweden leads a European offensive (followed by neighbors Denmark and Finland) with an average of 3.72 guesses to get the right word. Australia, the second country where Wordle went viral after taking off in New Zealand, occupies a respectable fourth place with an average of 3.80 turns.
There’s only one Wordle puzzle posed each day, and everybody in the world is doing it, so it can’t be a waste of time – can it? Tell that to Professor Barry Smyth in Ireland, who was obsessed enough to build a Wordle simulator that can play millions of games in just a few hours. The idea was to learn how best to play – although with a national average of 3.87 turns, Ireland is already pretty hot at Wordle.
Australian Cities Dominate Global Wordle Scene
In game developer terms, Wordle is “juicy” (the interface responds pleasurably) and has a carefully calibrated “flow” (balance of challenge vs. reward). But most importantly for its global success, Wordle embodies a not-doing-workism that doesn’t induce slacker guilt. An Australian city leads the way in prodigious slacking, with Canberra nailing it in 3.58 on average. Three other Aussie cities feature in the top 10.
It’s a closely-fought battle at the top. Malmö and Durban are separated by an average of just 0.00089286; Manila and Geneva by 0.00358209. We suspect that to a very niche and very passionate nerd minority, these figures count for a lot.
North Dakota is America’s Wordle State
Wordle creator Josh Wardle has created a viral grid before: r/Place on Reddit. This 2017 interactive involved a single million-pixel canvas that users could decorate one pixel at a time, subject to certain rules, creating a kind of worldwide digital patchwork quilt. After 72 hours, the project closed. Following “a surprisingly beautiful clash of communities, nations, ideologies, and fandoms,” the final canvas ended with a neat US flag right in its middle.
This is how America colored Josh’s next grid. The US, as a whole, ranks 18th in the world for Wordle scores, with a national average of 3.92 guesses. But America’s ‘green state’ is North Dakota, with an average of just 3.65 – better than any national average in the world.
Saint Paul, Minnesota, is the US Capital City of Wordle
Wordle has around three million players worldwide but only one person has won a big prize: inventor Josh Wardle, who sold the game for upwards of $1m to the New York Times. “If you’ve followed along with the story of Wordle,” says Wardle, “you’ll know that New York Times Games play a big part in its origins, and so this step feels very natural to me.” However, natives of that journal’s city struggle a little with that puzzle: New York’s average score is 3.81, ranking the city #26 out of the 116 US cities with available data.
St Paul, Minnesota, leaves other American cities in the dust with an average Wordle score of 3.51, making it the US Capital of Wordle. Just consider that 3.51 average means many St Paulites are regularly nailing the daily word in three guesses or fewer.
You can’t blame the New York Times for spending big bucks on a game that will bring millions of daily users to their domain. But Wordle will run out of new answers by 2028 if it continues in its current form without repetition. Do you think you can get over your addiction before then?
Bristol Takes the Crown in the United Kingdom as Best City to Solve Wordle
As a bonus which was not included in the original article, Bristol is considered the best city in the United Kingdom at solving Wordle, with 3.73 guesses on average — followed by Newcastle upon Tyne and London.
Toronto is the Best City in Canada to Solve Wordle? Why, I Ottawa…
As a bonus which was not included in the original article, Toronto is considered the best city in Canada at solving Wordle, with 3.81 guesses on average — followed by Vancouver and Ottawa.
Final Boarding Call
I was actually quite surprised that the name of the game came from its inventor John Wardle. That is quite clever, in my opinion.
Although it is not one of my favorite word games to play, I do like playing Wordle — along with its geographic knockoff called Worldle, about which you can read in this recent article here at The Gate.
In the meantime, happy Wordling…
Source: Wordle. Screen shot by Brian Cohen.
