The best Wordle starting words, and why
A first guess cannot be right except by luck, so it should not try to be. Its job is to eliminate as much of the field as possible — and that is a measurable property, not a matter of taste.
Which letters appear in the most five-letter words
Counted across all 13,143 five-letter words we hold. The number is how many of those words contain the letter at least once.
- S5,995 45.6%
- E5,788 44.0%
- A5,417 41.2%
- R3,962 30.1%
- O3,960 30.1%
- I3,658 27.8%
- L3,144 23.9%
- T3,065 23.3%
- N2,816 21.4%
- U2,457 18.7%
- D2,329 17.7%
- Y2,047 15.6%
- C1,935 14.7%
- P1,902 14.5%
- M1,883 14.3%
Our list is a Scrabble word list, so it is wider than the set Wordle draws its answers from — it includes plurals and obscure words the puzzle would never choose. For picking an opening guess that is fine: what you want is a word the game accepts, and the ranking of common letters is the same either way.
What makes an opening word good
Three things, in this order:
- Five different letters. A repeated letter wastes a slot. SPEED tests four letters; SPINE tests five.
- Common letters. The list above is the whole argument: a guess made of letters that appear in a third of all words tells you far more than one built on J, Q and Z.
- Common positions. A letter is more informative where it usually sits. An S at the end is nearly a free answer, because so many words end in one — but for the same reason it eliminates less.
The classic openers — CRANE, SLATE, ADIEU, ROATE — are all built on the same principle. There is no single best word, and the difference between the top few is smaller than the difference between any of them and a guess with two Es in it.
The second guess matters more than the first
Most players agonise over the opener and then improvise. That is backwards. The opener is fixed and can be chosen once; the second guess is where the information you just earned gets used or wasted.
Two habits change results more than any opening word:
- Do not reuse grey letters. Obvious, and everybody does it anyway under time pressure.
- Enter where a yellow letter is not. A yellow tells you two things: the letter is in the word, and it is not in that square. Half the information is in the second half, and it typically halves the candidate list. The Wordle solver has a field for exactly this, and it is the one people skip.
When to stop guessing and start eliminating
With two guesses left and four candidates that differ in one position, guessing one of them is a one-in-four shot. A word that is not a candidate at all, but tests three of those four distinguishing letters, wins every time. That trade — giving up a chance at being right now in exchange for certainty next turn — is the single biggest gap between an average and a good Wordle player.
This is what our solver orders results by: how much a word narrows the field, not whether it might be the answer.
Common questions
Is there one best starting word? Analyses disagree, because the answer depends on which answer list and which scoring you optimise for. Any word with five distinct common letters is within a fraction of the best; pick one and reuse it, so your second guesses become familiar too.
Should I use the same opener every day? Yes, if you want to improve. A fixed opener means you learn the common follow-up positions, and your second guess gets faster and better.
Do you publish today's answer? No. The solver works from the clues you have already earned. Handing over the answer would end the puzzle, which is the part you came for.
Does this work for other five-letter games? Yes. Anything that gives green, yellow and grey feedback works the same way, and so does the solver.