The best Wordle starting words

A starting word cannot be right or wrong, but it can be efficient or wasteful. The efficient ones test the letters that appear in the most answers, use five different letters, and place them where words commonly have them. This guide measures popular openers against the same dictionary this solver uses, then shows how to pair a first and second guess, and lists openers for 4, 6, 7, and 8 letter games.

Which letters matter most

Of the 8,636 five-letter words in this site’s list, the share that contain each letter at least once is:

• S 46%
• E 45%
• A 40%
• R 31%
• O 29%
• I 28%
• L 25%
• T 24%

S, E, and A each appear in more than four words out of ten. R, O, I, L, and T form the next tier. A first guess built from five of these eight letters tests the most ground. Vowel-heavy openers such as ADIEU and AUDIO look attractive because they place four vowels, but U appears in only 18% of the list, and a word with four vowels leaves no room for S, R, or T, which carry more information.

Openers ranked by words left behind

The fairest way to score an opener is to play it against every possible answer, group the answers by the color pattern they return, and average the size of the group you would land in. A lower number means fewer words to sort through on the second row. The table below does that for common openers against all 8,636 words. The “patterns” column counts how many distinct color patterns the word can produce; more patterns means finer splits.

TARES, RATES, and SOARE lead because they test S, E, A, R, and T or O, with S and E in the positions where five-letter words carry them most often. RAISE, LASER, STARE, SLATE, AROSE, and ARISE sit in the next band; the differences between them are small enough that habit and comfort are reasonable tie-breakers. CRANE, TRACE, and CRATE score noticeably worse here because C appears in only about 16% of this list, well below S or R.

One caveat matters. These numbers use the full ENABLE list, which includes many uncommon words. The daily newspaper puzzle draws from a much smaller set of everyday words, and against that set CRANE, SLATE, and TRACE perform better than they do here, which is why they appear in so many recommendations. If your puzzle uses common words, any opener from the top two bands is a sound choice. If you play on a site that uses a large dictionary, prefer the S-and-E-heavy words at the top of the table.

What the solver itself suggests on row one

When you open the five-letter solver with an empty board, its recommendation list is produced by letter coverage rather than full simulation, since simulating 8,636 guesses against 8,636 answers would slow the page for little gain. That method ranks AROSE, ARISE, and RAISE first, followed by other arrangements of the same letters such as SERAI and LARES, then LASER. The two methods agree on the shortlist even if they order it differently.

Reading the first row

A typical first row returns one or two colored tiles. The row above already says a great deal: the answer ends in E, contains an R somewhere other than position two, and has no A, O, or S. Enter it in the solver and the list drops from 8,636 to 54 words. The gray tiles are doing as much work as the colored ones; 69% of the five-letter list contains an S or an A, so ruling both out removes more than two-thirds of the words on its own.

Pairing a second guess

If the first row shows mostly gray, do not reuse its letters. Play a second word built from the next tier: L, I, N, T, O, U, C, D. Good pairs with no letters in common are AROSE then UNLIT, RAISE then CLOUT, and STARE then DOILY or PINTO. After two such rows you have tested ten different letters, including every vowel but one, and the solver’s list is usually down to a few dozen words. From that point the next-guess ranking switches to full simulation and gives you precise advice.

If the first row shows two or more greens, a fixed second word is wasteful. Let the solver rank the remaining words instead, and pick either a possible answer or the information guess it suggests, depending on how many rows you have left.

Starting words for other lengths

Longer words tilt the letter frequencies: E and S dominate more, and I and N move up. Shorter words spread them out. The openers below come from this solver’s ranking against the full list for each length.

• 6-letter games: SERIAL, ARISEN, SATIRE, ARIELS. Top letters E 61%, S 46%, A 43%, R 40%.
• 7-letter games: RETAINS, NASTIER, SENATOR, ISOLATE. Top letters E 66%, S 53%, I 48%, A 47%.
• 8-letter games: NOTARIES, SCENARIO, ARTICLES, ISLANDER. Top letters E 69%, S 58%, I 54%, A 51%.
• 4-letter games: EARS, SALE, ALES, SEAR. Top letters A 35%, E 34%, S 33%, O 27%.

Should you always use the same opener?

Using one opener every day has a real benefit: you learn what its patterns mean and read the first row faster. Rotating between two or three openers from the top bands costs almost nothing in efficiency. What does cost is an opener with a repeated letter, a rare letter such as J, Q, X, or Z, or four vowels. Those waste a tile on the first row, and the first row is where a tile is worth the most.

Whatever you open with, enter the colors in the Wordle solver and let the ranking take over from row two. For the rule behind yellow and gray copies of the same letter, read how repeated letters change the colors.