Which State Is the Best at Wordle? It's More Than 5 Letters.

North Dakota doesn’t usually find itself near the top of state rankings, but it may have just discovered its niche. According to analysis by Wordtips, a website devoted to cheats for word games, the Peace Garden State is the very best in the nation at solving Wordle, the viral game that was sold to The New York Times a little over a month ago for seven figures.

For those still unaware of how the game works, users have up to six guesses to figure out Wordle’s word of the day, which is always a five-letter word. If you guess a correct letter, in the correct spot of the word, the box will light up green. If you guess a correct letter, but in an incorrect spot, the box will light up yellow. Incorrect letters turn boxes grey.

Vowel-heavy entries are a good idea early, and can help you pinpoint the word in six guesses or fewer. But it isn’t always easy to solve the puzzle, especially if you’re tuning in every day (as many have made it a tradition of doing). From that perspective, North Dakota’s average score of solving the puzzle in 3.65 attempts is pretty impressive. Here’s how other states fared:

Overall, this is a strong showing for the U.S. We may be lagging on bipartisanship, affordable healthcare and common-sense infrastructure, but we’re pretty good at plugging in words like SNAKE, MEANT and ADIEU in the name of defeating a morning puzzle. Even the very worst state (Alaska), isn’t too far behind the pack, logging in with an average of 4.22 guesses each day.

In order to compile this data, Wordtips pulled nearly 200,000 tweets with the hashtag #wordle, and “extracted the game score” from about 75% of them. They counted tweets that reported the fraction (like 3/6) or posted a screenshot of the finished product, and started separating the data by cities and countries only in areas where there were at least 50 tweets. Some fascinating global conclusions: Canberra, Australia is the Wordle capital of the world, averaging just 3.58 guesses per day, while Sweden took first prize overall for nations (at 3.72 guesses).

If there’s a critique to be volleyed at this study, it’s that the people most likely to tweet out their Wordle scores are probably pretty good at Wordle. There’s a decent chance they’re competing with friends and communities online, and would refrain from posting on days where they didn’t figure out the word. On the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, there’s a possibly some are “shitposting” their bad scores, as a way of complaining about a difficult word, or publicly laughing about themselves. A couple sixes, in a region that doesn’t have too many tweets, could totally sabotage the average.

That said, it’s nice to have a sense of national competition for a change, after weeks of competing against family members and coworkers. As for Wordtips itself, which no doubt conducted this study to get its name out there, we have to pass an unfortunate ruling: word-finding services are not allowed when you’re trying to solve the puzzle.

Hang in there Alaska, you got this.