(I think this is on-topic because it’s using Unix, it’s problem-solving with computers, and it’s statistical analysis and cryptanalysis, so I’m not avoiding Wordle on Lobste.rs).

Note that the letter distributions for Wordle are quite different from those I see in /usr/share/dict/words; in particular S drops in frequency enough to skew the results significantly. It looks as though Wordle drops all plurals which end S, such that of the 36 remaining ????S words, 21 end SS and 12 end US.

curl -Lo wordle_words.crlf https://github.com/AllValley/WordleDictionary/raw/main/wordle_solutions_alphabetized.txt
tr -d $'\r' < wordle_words.crlf > wordle_words
rm wordle_words.crlf
LC_COLLATE=C grep -E '^[a-z]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words > latin_words
grep -E '^[[:lower:]]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words | recode -f utf8..flat > normalized_words
LC_COLLATE=C grep -E '^[a-z]+$' /usr/share/dict/words > latin_all

Then, using zsh syntax (I can’t be bothered to rewrite the array expansions to be bash-compatible):

WL=(latin_all normalized_words latin_words wordle_words)

 # Letter occurs counts:
for F in $WL; do
  { echo "= $F"; for L in {a..z}; do echo "$(grep -c $L $F) $L"; done | sort -nr } >t.$F
done; paste t.$WL | column -t; rm t.$WL

 # Total counts of letters, including repeated letters:
for F in $WL; do
  { echo "= $F"; for L in {a..z}; do echo "$(fold -bw 1 < $F | grep -c $L) $L"; done | sort -nr } >t.$F
done; paste t.$WL | column -t; rm t.$WL

 # Letters repeated the most:
for F in $WL; do
  { echo "= $F"; for L in {a..z}; do present=$(grep -c $L $F); total=$(fold -bw 1 < $F | grep -c $L);
    echo "$((total - present)) $L" ; done | sort -nr } > t.$F
done; paste t.$WL | column -t ; rm t.$WL

That should get you three tables of the letter distributions, across four dictionaries each. The first is “counts of words containing that letter”. The second is “counts of that letter” The third is “difference between the two prior counts”.

I had more fun coding up something for Wordle than I did trying to play it.

Let us now solve the Wordle for Sat, 22 Jan 2022 …:

$ grep -P '^(?=[a-z]{5})[^aros]{4}e$' /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 5
beige
belie
belle
bible
bilge
$ grep -P '^(?=.*i.*)(?=[a-z]{5})[^arosbeg]{2}[^arosbegi][^arosbeg]e$' /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 5
fiche
indue
lithe
mince
niche
$ grep -P '^(?=.*c.*)(?=[a-z]{5})[^arosbegfh]i[^arosbegfchi][^arosbegfh]e$' /usr/share/dict/words
mince
wince
$ grep -P '^(?=[a-z]{5})[^arosbegfhm]ince$' /usr/share/dict/words
wince

For weeks I’ve been avoiding Twitter (and hence spending more time reading articles from Lobste.rs) because of the flood of Wordle garble that took over my timeline. Thank you, thank you for bringing that scourge here too. Now excuse my while I turn off the electricity and hide under a tinfoil blanket…