Best Wordle Starting Words

The ranking, and what it measures

For each opener, we coloured it against every answer in the list and counted how many answers share each colour pattern. The average number of answers left after the first guess is the main score; fewer is better. Words built from E, A, R, O, T, L, S and N in common positions dominate. Words heavy in vowels find vowels but leave the consonants — which is where five-letter words actually differ — untested.

Second words that complete the opener

An opener is half of a pair. The best second word uses five letters the opener didn't, chosen from the next tier of frequency. Across the original answer list the twelve most common letters are E, A, R, O, T, I, L, S, N, U, C and Y.

SLATE → CRONY. Between them: S, L, A, T, E, C, R, O, N, Y — ten of those twelve. Over the answer list the pair leaves 5.1 possible answers on average.

CRANE → SLOTH leaves 5.5 on average; CRANE → MOIST 5.4.

TRACE → LIONS leaves 4.7; TRACE → SOLID 4.8 — the best of the pairs we measured.

Only abandon the pair when guess one returns two or more greens; then the candidate list is already small and you should solve rather than test.

Openers that feel good and aren't

ADIEU and AUDIO are popular openers and among the weakest on the data: they leave 123 and 183 answers on average, against 60 to 79 for the strong openers. They tell you which vowels are present, which is pleasant, but five-letter words are distinguished by their consonants, and you then spend guess two finding those anyway. Words with a repeated letter waste a slot outright. Words ending in S are worse than they look, because only 36 of the 2,309 original answers end in S.

If you play hard mode

Hard mode changes the calculus: the game requires any revealed hints to be used in later guesses, so you cannot throw away greens on guess two, and the pair strategy above stops being legal once guess one finds anything. An opener whose likely greens fall in common positions is worth a little more, because a green you are forced to keep is less of a burden where many answers share it. SLATE's S-first and E-last are both high-frequency positions in the answer list (15.8% and 18.3% of answers), which is one argument for it over the statistically stronger ROATE in hard mode.

What the numbers actually say

Measure openers two ways and the leaders change. By average answers left, ROATE (60.1), RAISE (60.7), TIARE, RAILE and SOARE lead among all 14,855 accepted words. By the number of distinct colour patterns an opener can produce — a measure of how finely it splits the list — TRACE leads with 150, then SALET, CRATE and REAST. SLATE is 31st on the first measure and seventh on the second; CRANE is 99th and 14th. The gap that matters is not between those words, which are all within twenty answers of each other, but between them and a weak opener: ADIEU ranks 1,892nd and AUDIO 6,293rd.

What makes an opener good is not the number of vowels. It is distinct, common letters in the positions where they are common in answers. In the original list S opens 15.8% of answers, C 8.6%, B 7.5% and T 6.5%; E ends 18.3% and Y 15.8%. An opener that tests five frequent letters where they tend to sit gets the most greens and yellows per guess.

The top openers, compared

Both measures, side by side, for the openers people actually argue about. Patterns is the number of distinct colour results the opener can produce across the answer list; worst case is the largest group of answers that share one result.

The second guess matters more

The opener is argued about because it is the only guess everyone plays identically; the second guess is where averages diverge. One strong opener followed by a fixed second word takes the original list from 2,309 possibilities to about five on average — TRACE then LIONS leaves 4.7, SLATE then CRONY 5.1 — whereas the difference between the strong openers alone is a dozen answers. After a mostly grey opener, a second guess that tests five new common letters is the efficient choice. After a green or a yellow, the calculus changes: if the found letters leave only a few candidates, guess a candidate; if they leave many, test again.

Fixed two-word openings — playing CRANE then SLOTH regardless of feedback — are popular and simple. They give up a little against adapting the second word to what the first one found, which matters to a player chasing a low average and hardly at all to a player who wants a reliable routine before coffee.

Hard mode and the opener

In hard mode every guess must reuse every revealed hint, which makes the opener's positions matter more: a green on guess one is locked there for the rest of the game, and a green E in fifth position, for instance, keeps you among the 422 answers that end in E. The crowded endings are where hard mode bites — the original list has nine words ending -IGHT, eight ending -OUND and seven ending -ATCH — because each guess can test only one of the differing letters. The safest hard-mode habit is a second guess that keeps the found letters while testing new consonants, since a pure probe is illegal.

Openers people play, and what they cost

Average answers left after the first guess, from the same measurement over the 2,309-word original list (for comparison, ROATE is 60.1):

• STARE 71.0, ARISE 63.5, RAISE 60.7, IRATE 63.5 — near the top; any is fine.
• ROATE 60.1 and ORATE 63.6 — the leaders on this measure, and still strong.
• ADIEU 123.4, AUDIO 183.2, OUIJA 245.5 — the vowel openers, two to four times as many answers left.
• QUEEN 310.9, JAZZY 700.3, FUZZY 854.2 — rare-letter openers, played for fun rather than for the average.
• A word that was a recent answer — no cost to the score, but the Times has an editor choosing words now, so it tells you nothing about tomorrow.

Changing your opener

Nobody's results are limited by their opener if it is one of the strong ones; they are limited by the second and fourth guesses. The useful experiment is not to switch openers but to keep one and watch your guess distribution: a chart peaking at four with a tail at six points at the second guess; a chart peaking at three with occasional sixes points at the repeated-letter trap on guess four. The Wordle solver shows how many words are left after each guess, the Wordle guide covers the middle game, and today's answer page has the letter breakdown for the current word, which is a daily one-line lesson in what your opener would have found.

Letter frequency, by position

The reason SLATE scores better than STALE (75.3) or LEAST (78.0) with the same five letters is position. In the original answer list S starts 365 words and ends 36; E ends 422 words; A sits in second and third position about equally (304 and 306 words) and rarely last; O is most common in second place (279), R in second (267) and last (212); L in second (200). An opener that puts each letter where that letter most often lives collects greens as well as yellows, and a green is worth more than a yellow because it removes a position from play. That is also why the vowel-first openers underperform even though their letters are common: ADIEU spends four of its five letters on vowels and tests only one consonant.

Position explains one more letter worth knowing. Y appears in 18% of answers and ends 15.8% of them, thanks to adjectives like DRYLY and NIFTY, both answers in September 2026. Openers rarely include it, but a second guess after a grey opener often should — CRONY does — and a fourth guess between candidates ending in -Y nearly always should.

A note on the answer list's edits

The figures above are computed on the 2,309-word original answer list that NYT's game code still carries. According to Wikipedia, the Times removed several offensive or insensitive words and some British spellings from the original 2,315 in 2022, and since November 2022 its editor has chosen answers by hand. The archive shows the result: 15 of the 41 answers from 1 September to 11 October 2026 were not on the 2,309-word list at all, from REMIX on 1 September to UNCAP on 11 October. They were still ordinary words built from ordinary letters, which is why the ranking holds up.

If you want a single sentence to take away: use ROATE, RAISE, SLATE or TRACE — whichever you will remember — adapt your second guess to the feedback, and spend your attention on guess four, because that is where games are won and lost.

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