u/michael-hyperbotic

Spoilers for 1,885 below, all tagged.

I ran all 19 openers from the NYT's reader chart against the answer to 1,885 through TurnWord Word Bot, an AI-trained solver I've been building, and counted how many words were still possible after guess one. Starting pool: 13k five-letter words.

Words left standing after the opening guess:

• Narrowed most: >!IRATE (5 left), ORATE (6), TRACE (10), TRAIN (16)!<
• Middle: >!STARE (30), SLATE (65), TARPS (73), ADIEU (161)!<
• Narrowed least: >!STEAL (330), PLACE (484), AUDIO (1,187), CLASP (roughly 1,900)!<

Worth saying clearly: none of these are bad openers. All 19 solved, and the spread was only >!two to four guesses — the two sharpest got there in two, fourteen in three, and the three loosest in four!<. >!PLACE left 484 words on the table and still finished in three.!< A big pool going into guess two isn't trouble; it just means the second guess does more of the work.

Two things that did surprise me:

Grey letters carry the load. &gt;!CLASP came back completely blank — no greens, no yellows — and that "failure" still killed 85% of the list.!< A whiff is information.

Letter coverage isn't elimination. &gt;!AUDIO covers four vowels and left 1,187 words alive. TRACE covers two and left 10.!< Knowing which letters are absent narrows far less than knowing where a letter sits.

So the useful question for an opener isn't "how many common letters does it have," it's "how many words does each possible result kill." Those rank differently — but on a day like 1,885, almost anything gets you home.

Drop your usual opener below and I'll run it against 1,885 for you. Or run it yourself — the bot's at turnword.com/apps/word-game-bot, free and no signup.

My business partner and I run a small studio called Hyperbotic LLC, and TurnWord is what we've been heads-down on. It's in beta. Five connected apps for 5-letter word puzzles, covering learning, playing, solving, and assisting depending on what you want out of a puzzle.

Starting with the one people seem to find most interesting:

Word Bot — give it a starting word and a target, and it plays the whole puzzle out, guess by guess, so you can watch how the AI reasons instead of just taking its answer. Swap the opener and the path gets shorter or longer in front of you. This is the one that made me rethink my own starting word.

Word Solver — the same engine, pointed at your live game. A neural net ranks candidate guesses by how much they'd narrow the remaining possibilities, not by how likely they are to be correct. Those are different objectives, and optimizing for the first one wins more games.

Word Player — an actual playable game rather than a tool. Unlimited puzzles, 1, 2, or 4 boards at once. Adjustable guess limits and difficulty, with AI suggestions on tap if you want them and ignorable if you don't.

Quick Finder — mark the letters you know and the ones you've ruled out, get every matching word. For when you're stuck and just want the field narrowed.

Advanced Finder — position-aware version. Green, yellow, gray set per slot, so you can encode a full board state instead of just which letters are in play.

There are also write-ups behind the tools: letter frequency breakdowns, common patterns, and which opening words hold up when you actually test them against the full answer list.

We built it because we kept arguing about opening-word strategy and wanted something better than vibes to settle it. Nothing's monetized and we haven't decided if it will be.

What I'd most like feedback on is the solver's recommendations. If it hands you a guess that feels wrong, reply with the board state and I'll dig into why it chose that.

https://turnword.com