Solving Wordle with Bash and friends: The best starting word

wordle_the_best_word.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Test letter frequency counting.
echo "abbey" | grep -o . | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

# Letter frequency of all five-letter words.
grep -o . wordle.dictionary | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

# Find word that contains letters from "searo".
grep s wordle.dictionary | grep e | grep a | grep r | grep o

# Filter out all words that contain any letter of "arose" word.
grep -P '[^arose]{5}' wordle.dictionary  | wc -l

# Build dictionaries with 4 and 3 letters.
grep -P "^[a-z]{4}$" /usr/share/dict/american-english \
    > 4.dictionary
grep -P "^[a-z]{3}$" /usr/share/dict/american-english \
    > 3.dictionary

# Create dictionary of four-letter words with -s suffix 
# that are also in Wordle dictionary.
while read -r line; do grep "${line}s" wordle.dictionary; done \
    < 4.dictionary > 4s.dictionary

# Create dictionary of three-letter words with -es suffix 
# that are also in Wordle dictionary.
while read -r line; do grep "${line}es" wordle.dictionary; done \
    < 3.dictionary > 3es.dictionary

# Create dictionary of three-letter words with -ies suffix
# created from words ending with 'y' that are also 
# in Wordle dictionary.
while read -r line; do grep "${line/y/ies}" wordle.dictionary; done \
    <<< $(grep -P 'y$' 3.dictionary) > 3ies.dictionary
    
# Create dictionary of four-letter words with -d suffix 
# that are also in Wordle dictionary.
while read -r line; do grep "${line}d" wordle.dictionary; done \
    < 4.dictionary > 4d.dictionary

# Create dictionary of three-letter words with -ed suffix 
# that are also in Wordle dictionary.
while read -r line; do grep "${line}ed" wordle.dictionary; done \
    < 3.dictionary > 3ed.dictionary

# Create dictionary of three-letter words with -ied suffix
# created from words ending with 'y' that are also 
# in Wordle dictionary.
while read -r line; do grep "${line/y/ied}" wordle.dictionary; done \
    <<< $(grep -P 'y$' 3.dictionary) > 3ied.dictionary

# Create complete dictionary of all imposters words by joining 
# our partial dictionaries, sorting them and finaly picking unique
# ones for the final dictionary.
cat 3es.dictionary 3ies.dictionary 3ed.dictionary 3ied.dictionary \
	4s.dictionary 4d.dictionary \
    | sort | uniq > imposters.dictionary

# Filter out words from 4s.dictionary from Wordle dictionary
# and create wordle_opinionated.dictonary.
comm -23 wordle.dictionary imposters.dictionary \
    > wordle_opinionated.dictionary

# Count words of opinionated dictionary.
wc -l wordle_opinionated.dictionary 

# Letter frequency of all five-letter words without imposters.
grep -o . wordle_opinionated.dictionary | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

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