Study claims Swedes are fastest at solving Wordle. How about Malaysians?

Wordtips said its study began by pulling 195,248 tweets with the hashtag #Wordle using Twitter’s API. — AFP

A study has revealed that players in Sweden are the fastest at solving Wordle puzzles with an average score of 3.72 guesses.

The study by website Wordtips also showed that Malaysians scored an average of 4.04 guesses, while neighbouring country Singapore came in with an average score of 3.88 guesses. Players in the United States averaged 3.92 guesses while those playing Wordle in Australia narrowly missed out on the top spot, coming in second after the Swedes with an average of 3.80 guesses.

In terms of the top 10 global cities that are the best at solving Wordle, Canberra in Australia came in on top with an average of 3.58 guesses. The only city in South-East Asia to appear in the list is Manila, Philippines at No. 9 with an average of 3.72 guesses.

Wordtips, a website that provides resources on how to solve word-based games like Scrabble and Word With Friends, said its study began by pulling 195,248 tweets with the hashtag #Wordle using Twitter’s API.

Game scores were then extracted from 142,669 tweets. The researchers looked for scores that were presented as a fraction or the grid of coloured squares. They also dropped 2,729 tweets with a score of X/6 as it meant the puzzle was not solved within the game’s six guesses format.

The data, which was collected in January this year, was grouped into use location by country, state and city. At the country level, only the countries with at least 50 tweets were included; while global cities and US cities rankings needed at least 25 tweets.

Meanwhile, a separate study by website WordFinderX claimed that more players are likely to be cheating on Wordle based on their analysis on Google Trends.

They said the search for “today’s Wordle” has surged from 0 in December 2021 to 100 in February this year, indicating searches for Wordle answers have reached peak popularity.

They added that most players cheated for the word “Aroma” and “Swill” as both registered 100s on Google’s search popularity scale. They also said the search interest for Wordle answers had increased sharply since it was acquired by the New York Times.

Wordle is a web-based puzzle game where players have to guess the five-letter word of the day in six tries. Guesses will be colour-coded to indicate the position of the guessed letter – green means correct, yellow means the letter is correct but in the wrong position, while grey means the letter is not in the word. Players then use the colours as clues to guess the word.

The game has also been adapted into other languages such as Bahasa Malaysia when developer Eugene Low released Katapat in January.