Gungahlin College science teacher Melissa Plush loves competing with her colleagues in getting Wordle out in the fewest guesses possible. She says more than a few of her students are also fans of the five-letter word game that has taken the world by storm.
So when she told them a study had found Canberrans were best in the world at Wordle, they were surprised. Proud. Frank. Eager. And a few other five-letter words.
"I talked to my students this afternoon and they were blown away," Mrs Plush said.
Yep, it's official. Canberra - the Bush Capital, city of roundabouts, foodie haven and best in the world at Wordle.
Forget Feel the Power, we 100 per cent need to get this on our number plates - Canberra: Wordle Champion of the World.
The game challenges participants to solve the mystery five-letter words in six guesses or less.
Grabbing the zeitgeist and not letting go, WordTips analysed Twitter data to find the countries and cities with the best Wordle scores in the world.
Canberra came out on top, with an impressive average score of 3.58 guesses.
Jerusalem was second-best city in the world, followed by Malmo in Sweden, both on 3.66 guesses.
Perth and Melbourne also made the top 10, with an average of 3.77 guesses.
Here's how Australian cities stack up against each other:
- Canberra 3.58
- Perth 3.70
- Melbourne 3.70
- Adelaide 3.71
- Sydney 3.75
- Brisbane 3.95
- Gold Coast 4.2
Mrs Plush was not so surprised Canberra came out on top, given its high education levels and social media use.
She, for one, was hooked on Wordle, a chance to step away from lesson planning and engage her brain in something altogether different.
"I've always loved word games and it just really appealed. It's one thing. You can focus on it," she said.
"Most days I can get it in three or four guesses but there are days when I haven't got it at all. The best I've done it in was two. That was a good day."
While Canberra is the best city in the world, with the lowest average number of guesses, Sweden is the world's best country at Wordle, with an average of 3.72 guesses, still more than Canberra's 3.58.
Russia was one of the worst-performing countries, with an average 4.10 guesses. No results for the Ukraine, but, just for the record, Poland beat Russia with a result of 3.79 guesses.
So how did they solve the puzzle of who is best at Wordle?
In January this year, word.tips pulled 195,248 tweets with hashtag #wordle using Twitter API.
It successfully extracted the game score from 142,669 tweets. To qualify, they were looking for the score presented as a fraction (for example 3/6 or 5/6) and the grid of coloured squares.
It dropped the rare cases where fraction and image contradicted each other. It also dropped 2729 tweets with a score of X/6, which meant that the puzzle was not solved with six guesses and kept only numeric scores.
The worldwide average number of guesses is 3.919 based on 139,940 tweets (of course, only tweeted results were counted).
Word.tip attempted to get the user location and grouped the data by country, state, and city. At the country level, it saved only the countries with at least 50 tweets; in global cities and US cities rankings - with at least 25 tweets.
