- Vowels and consonants appear more often in some positions than in others
- S, R, L, T and N are the most common consonants in five-letter words
- Click HERE to play GuessWord on your smartphone, tablet or web browser
Completing DailyMail.com’s FREE new GuessWord puzzle will require you to eliminate potential words in as few guesses and in as little time as possible.
A good way to do this is to exclude the most common letters in five-letter words from the start of the game.
The ten most common letters in five-letter English words are: A, E, S, O, R, I, L, T, N and U, according to Thesaurus.com.
This means that playing those letters allows you to confirm the letters that are in the mystery word, but also exclude parts of words that cannot be.
Among that top ten are all five vowels and five consonants.
The ten most common letters in five-letter English words are: A, E, S, O, R, I, L, T, N and U, according to Thesaurus.com
According to a analysis by Behrouz Bakhtiari for the publication Towards Data Science, there are more than 15,000 single words of five letters.
Those more than 15,000 words represent only 4.3 percent of all words.
And virtually every English word contains at least one vowel. According to that analysis, there are 6223, 8568, 1055, 18, and 0 words with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 unique vowels, respectively.
Although these vowels can appear in any position in the mystery word, there are certain positions in which they are more likely to occur.
And according to a blog post by Bowen Kerins for the Art of Problem Solving, both the second and third letters in the mystery word are vowels rather than consonants.
By far the most common fourth letter was E, which is in that position in about 1 in 7 words, the analysis showed.
By starting words with a larger number of vowels, the plater can rule out more five-letter words more quickly
GuessWord is unique from other interpretations of the five-letter puzzle in that it offers players a starting letter that can appear anywhere in the mystery word.
While that’s an advantage in some ways, it also forces the player to think a little harder about what word they use to start the game.
And in GuessWord, players must pay attention to both the number of guesses they use and the time it takes to reach the end.
The longer they spend on each gamble, the lower they fall in the rankings.
Multiple choice questions are also offered, such as MasterQuiz, Mindbender and Quick Quiz. MasterQuiz is a six-round quiz that tests readers on their current affairs and general knowledge.
Mindbender measures your mental acuity with a handful of questions about arithmetic and verbal reasoning. The fastest of the bunch is Quick Quiz – a rapid-fire game consisting of five short questions.
And every Saturday, a ten-round quiz – Pub Quiz – is updated with ten general trivia questions.
Try all our new puzzles today by clicking HERE or visiting www.dailymail.co.uk/puzzles on any device.