Best Wordle Starting Words

The top 10 starting words, ranked

Each first guess was scored by how many bits of information it earns on average — a measure of how sharply the green, yellow, and gray feedback splits the remaining possibilities. More bits means fewer words left to consider on guess two.

The four words that technically beat TRACE — TIARE (a Tahitian gardenia), TARSE, ROATE, and SOARE (a young hawk) — are obscure dictionary entries most players have never seen. Among words you would actually say out loud, TRACE and CRATE sit at the top, separated by just 0.002 bits. They are anagram cousins for a reason: T, R, A, C, and E are five of the most valuable letters in the game.

Best everyday starting words: the numbers

Here are the top real-word openers with the full stats. “Words left after” is the average number of possible answers remaining once you see the colors from that guess.

Notice the trade-offs: SLATE produces the most greens per game (0.64) because S, L, A, T, and E love those exact positions, while IRATE and RAISE find a letter in at least 92% of games. Any of these ten is a genuinely strong opener — the gap between #1 and #10 is smaller than the luck of a single puzzle.

ADIEU vs the data: the popular picks, tested

ADIEU is one of the most popular starting words in the world — and against real Wordle answers it ranks #3,332 out of 14,931. AUDIO does even worse at #5,953.

The problem isn't that vowels are bad — it's that four-vowel words tell you which letters are in the answer without telling you much about where, and they skip R, S, T, and C entirely. ADIEU finds at least one letter in 92.8% of games (the highest hit rate of any popular opener!) but still leaves ~96 candidates on the table, nearly double what TRACE leaves. Finding a yellow E is a shrug; finding a green E is a clue.

Which letters actually appear in Wordle answers

This is the letter distribution across all 1,841 unique answers Wordle has used — not a generic English word list. E leads at 47%, and the top seven letters (E, A, R, O, T, L, I) explain why every elite opener is built from them.

Position matters: where letters like to sit

Greens are worth far more than yellows, so a great opener puts common letters in their favorite slots. S opens 14.8% of all answers and E closes 19.7% of them — SLATE and STARE nail both ends.

Why vowel-stuffing backfires

Nearly nine out of ten real answers contain only one or two vowels. Playing four vowels on guess one spends most of your turn testing letters the answer probably uses once — while the consonants that would actually distinguish STARE from SCARE from SNARE go untested.

The best two-word openings

If you like a fixed one-two punch (especially on harder puzzles), these pairs earned the most combined information in our analysis. Each pairing covers ten distinct letters, including at least eight of the ten most frequent.

A word of caution: a scripted second guess is optimal only when your first guess comes back mostly gray. If TRACE hands you two greens, you're usually better off attacking the small set of remaining words directly — our Wordle Solver can list them for you.

The worst starting words (for fun)

At the very bottom of every word we tested: XVIII, QAJAQ, ZHUZH, JUJUS, IMMIX. The champion of futility is XVIII — yes, Wordle accepts the Roman numeral — which leaves about 861 of the 1,841 possible answers still alive. Its letters miss two-thirds of puzzles entirely.

How we ran the numbers

For each of 14,931 five-letter words — spanning Wordle's accepted guess list of roughly 13,000 words, plus some dictionary extras — we simulated the exact green/yellow/gray feedback each would produce against every one of the 1,859 answers the NYT has actually published (2021-06-19 to 2026-07-21, including the 18 words the Times has reused). A guess scores highly when its feedback splits the answer pool into many small, evenly sized groups — measured as Shannon entropy, in bits. One extra bit halves the words you have left.

Because Wordle's answers are curated common words (no plurals-in-S, no obscure strings), rankings built on real answers differ from ones built on raw dictionaries — that's why SALET, the mathematically optimal opener from MIT's famous analysis of the original word list, lands at only #15 here, and WordleBot's old favorite CRANE sits at #23. This page is regenerated as the answer archive grows.