My Wordle result on Christmas Day this year looked like this:
⬛⬛🟩🟩⬛
⬛⬛🟩🟩⬛
⬛🟩🟩🟩⬛
⬛🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
It almost looked like what I wanted, which was a Christmas tree with a star, like this:
⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛
⬛🟩🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
This got me thinking a little bit. For one, is such a pattern possible? It probably is given the large amount of accepted Wordle guesses. But more importantly, does there exist a sequence of guesses which “makes sense”, and still produces the desired pattern.
It turns out producing Wordle art isn’t a new thing. Frankly, this is not a difficult thing to accomplish: simply loop through the word dictionaries until the desired pattern is matched and move on to the next pattern. This is not some big data exercise as the number of words is less than 13000.
The second question, can we make a sequence which makes the art while still making “sense”, is also pretty easy. I define making sense in the Wordlebot manner:
If a sequence of guesses strictly reduces the number of possible answers.
The reason we ask for strict inequality is that if the nth guess results in only 1 remaining possible solution (say “carol”), then the next guess must be “carol.” This means that, with possibly more guesses than available, one can always find the answer.
This was not difficult to code up in a brute force manner, and, spoilers, for the solution on 12/25/2025, PRISM, one could’ve guessed
FORTH
QUIET
BRISK
PRISM
and gotten the nice Christmas tree.
Code located here.