Does Wordle Use Past Tense Words?

At Wordlefriend, we’re constantly analyzing Wordle behavior and one of the analyses that we’ve done focused on determining if Wordle ever uses words ending in -ED as an answer. There are 243 such words in the Wordle dictionary. They break down as follows:

Here is a quick look at whether or not any of these words have been used as answers by Wordle before:

Excluding our eleven -IED words and the words that are clearly not past tense, none of the -ED words have ever been used as an answer by Wordle in the past. This is in spite of the fact that they represent roughly 7% of all the words in the dictionary.

In addition, Wordle reflects the low priority of these words in their user interface, which we can see in the following screen shot from the New York Times Wordle Analysis site:

We’re showing a screen shot from within the Wordle analysis tool where they compare the words that were remaining after our last guess with the words that are remaining after what their guess would have been.

We’ve selected just a portion of the data that happens to show a large number of -ED words. Notice how the second column associated with all these words shows a probability of <0.1%. This is confirmation that these words have been artificially deprecated.

For this reason, Wordlefriend offers an option to do the same in Wordlefriend as well. You can read more about the options in Wordlefriend in this article.