Strongly agree. For me, there are several levels of 'assistance' with the game, and at some point it becomes cheating.

1. Guessing the first word(s) randomly, and then solving from there. Not cheating at all, but frustrating for me, as I am terrible at anagrams.

2. Using a generic dictionary to check possible answers against. Not cheating. I use the standard dictionary in my Linux distro, filtered by 5-letter words.

3. Using the dictionary from the source code to check against. Skirting dangerously close to cheating, but probably OK.

4. Using the list of possible answers. Clearly cheating.

5. Using starting guesses that I concocted myself by studying a generic letter frequency table. Not cheating.

6. Using optimal starting guesses, generated by someone else, based on the WORDLE letter frequencies. Cheating.

7. Using software that I wrote to automate my elimination process based on the dictionary in (2). Again, skirting close to cheating, but possibly OK.

8. Using someone else's software to guess, based on solution graphs. Cheating.

How is using any dictionary not cheating? Why would you check possible answers? Just enter them, if they're not words, you don't lose a guess.

For me "cheating" is anything I would not be able to come up with on my own, if I played the game with no prior knowledge, repeatedly, in an offline environment with no external assistance available.

It's not a competition--and all the answers are known--so there's no such thing as cheating. People are free to take whatever approach to it they want to.

I had a similar feeling (though 'cheating' is kinda strong). So I took a dictionary and some letter-frequency stats (also from norvig.com) and computed a three-word opener using the 12 most common consonants and 3 most common vowels: CHAMP GELDS FRONT. (There were more word-sets satisfying the condition; this was the most memorable.)

I guess I'll try this notebook tomorrow and see how it rates my opening.