Best Wordle Starting Words: What Letter Frequency Actually Says

Everyone has a favourite Wordle opener. Some people swear by ADIEU because it uses four vowels. Others use CRANE or SLATE because a solver recommended it. We wanted to see what the letters themselves say, so we ran the numbers on our own word list.

How we measured

We took every five-letter word in our 275,000-word dictionary and kept only the ones in common use (about 2,785 words), since Wordle answers are everyday words rather than obscure ones. Then, for each letter, we counted what share of those words contain it at least once.

The result is a simple ranking of how likely each letter is to appear in a typical five-letter word:

(We've left out the middle of the table for space; P, M, B, G, K, F, W and V fall between H and X.)

Scoring opening words

A good first guess should test letters that are likely to be in the answer, without repeating any. So we gave each word a coverage score: the sum of the percentages above for its five distinct letters. Higher means your first guess is more likely to light up yellow or green tiles.

What this tells us

Vowel-heavy openers are overrated. ADIEU and AUDIO test four vowels, but U and I are less common than you'd think, and D is middling. Words that pair two or three vowels with R, S, T or L test more of the likely letters overall.

S is a trap at the end. Our list includes plurals, which inflates S. The official Wordle answer list mostly avoids simple plurals, so an S at the end of your guess is less useful than this table suggests. That's one reason solver programs that use the actual answer list often favour words like SLATE, CRANE or TRACE, which put S at the start or leave it out entirely.

Position matters too. Coverage only measures whether a letter appears, not where. In our list, S is by far the most common first letter and E is the most common fourth letter, while Y is very common at the end. A guess like SLATE puts S, A and E in common positions, which earns more green tiles than an anagram like LEAST.

A practical two-word system

Many players use a fixed pair of openers that together test ten different common letters. For example:

1. AROSE (tests A, R, O, S, E)
2. UNLIT (tests U, N, L, I, T)

After those two guesses, you've checked all five vowels and five of the most common consonants. This is less exciting than trying to solve in two, but it makes three- and four-guess solves very consistent.

Other good pairs:

• SLATE + CORNY
• CRANE + SPLIT (leaves O and U untested, so add a third guess if needed)
• IRATE + SOUND

After your opener: think in constraints

Once you have some colours, the game becomes a filtering problem:

• Green: the letter is fixed in that position.
• Yellow: the letter is in the word but not in that position.
• Grey: the letter isn't in the word (unless it appears elsewhere as yellow or green).

Our word finder can help you practise this logic outside the daily puzzle. Set "starts with" or "contains" to the letters you know and the length to 5 to see which words remain. (Using it during your daily Wordle is up to you. Many players prefer to keep the daily game tool-free and use solvers only to review afterwards.)

Hard mode

In Wordle's hard mode, any revealed hint must be used in later guesses. That makes the two-word system impossible, so your opener carries more weight. Words with high coverage and common positions (SLATE, STARE, CRANE) tend to work best, because they give you strong constraints you're happy to keep using.

The short version

• Use an opener with three or four of E, S, A, R, O, T, L, I, N, and no repeated letters.
• Put S at the start rather than the end.
• Don't rely on four-vowel words; they test too few common consonants.
• Consider a fixed second word to cover what your opener missed.

For more on common five-letter words and where their letters fall, see our 5-letter words list.