Best Wordle Starting Words

The top ten

Higher is better. The score combines how many common letters a word tests with how often those letters sit where the word puts them.

LARES leads on 187.72 points of letter coverage and 81.88 of position fit.

How the score works

Two measurements, both taken from the dictionary rather than from anyone's intuition.

Coverage asks, for each letter, what share of five-letter words contain it at all. S turns up in 46.31% of them, E in 44.95%, A in 40.47%. A word's coverage is the sum of those shares across its distinct letters, which is why a repeated letter earns nothing the second time: the second L in a word tells you nothing the first one did not.

Position fit asks the narrower question of how often each letter appears in the exact slot this word puts it in. A word ending in S scores well here because a great many five-letter words end in S. The final score is coverage plus half the position fit, so coverage leads and position breaks the ties.

What makes a good Wordle starting word?

Three things, in this order. It should use common letters, because a guess made of rare ones tells you almost nothing. It should put those letters where they usually sit, since a green is worth far more than a yellow. And it should not repeat a letter, because a repeat spends one of your five slots asking a question you have already asked.

That is the whole of it. Everything the ranking below does is measure those three properties across every five-letter word in the dictionary and add them up. You can apply the same test by eye: SLATE, CRANE and TRACE are good starting words for exactly these reasons, and each one lands inside the top hundred without any arithmetic.

A good opener and the best opener are close enough that the difference is not worth losing sleep over. Pick one you can remember and use it every day, because a familiar opener you play instantly beats an optimal one you have to look up first.

So what is the single best starting word for Wordle?

LARES, on this measurement, with a score of 228.66. It tests five different letters, four of them among the ten most common in five-letter words, and puts each one where that letter usually sits.

Treat that as the top of a range rather than a verdict. The words ranked second through tenth are within a few points of it, which is a gap you will never feel across a year of playing. What matters far more than which of them you pick is that you pick one and keep using it: a familiar opener you play in two seconds beats an optimal one you have to look up.

The best 3 starting words for Wordle

If you want to open with the same three words every day and only start thinking on the fourth guess, you want fifteen different letters rather than three high scores. These three were searched out of 3,883 five-letter letter patterns for exactly that: no letter repeats across any of them.

Between them they spend the fifteen letters O, U, T, E, R, C, A, M, P, S, L, I, N, D, Y, and give up on B, F, G, H, J, K, Q, V, W, X, Z. Played blind against every five-letter word in the dictionary, the three test an average of 3.87 of the answer's five letters, and for 38.7% of words they cover the whole answer, which means the board has told you every letter before your fourth guess.

The cost is real and worth stating. Playing all three regardless of what comes back spends half your guesses on information you may not need, so if the first two leave you with an obvious answer, take it. This is a method for people who would rather never be stuck on guess five than occasionally win on guess two.

Wordle starter words: how many do you need?

One, if you are happy to think from guess two onward. Two, if you want the common letters covered before you start narrowing. Three only if you are following the fixed opening above. Past three you are spending guesses you will want back.

A second starter is the best value of the three. Play LARES, then a word made entirely of letters it did not test, and you will have asked about ten distinct letters in two guesses while still holding four. That is usually enough to leave a handful of candidates, which is the point at which a word finder earns its keep.

Reading the list honestly

You may not know some of these words. LARES are Roman household gods, NARES are nostrils, ARLES is old money paid to seal a bargain. That is not a flaw in the ranking, and it is worth being clear about why.

This analysis covers the whole ENABLE dictionary, not the curated list of answers the New York Times actually draws from. Those are different sets: the answer list is deliberately common words, while the guessable list is enormous. But an opening guess is not an attempt to win on turn one. It is an instrument for testing letters, and Wordle accepts any word on its much larger guess list. An obscure word that tests S, E, A, R and L works exactly as hard as a familiar one.

If you would rather open with something you recognize, you barely give anything up. TEARS ranks 15th at 219.30, RAISE 37th at 213.51, AROSE 65th at 209.96, STARE 93rd at 206.84. All four sit within ten points of the leader, which in practice is a difference you will never feel.

Openers, and what to do next

The instinct to cram in vowels is the most common mistake. AUDIO holds four of them and ranks 4,087th; ADIEU ranks 1,995th. They spend letters on U, which appears in under a fifth of five-letter words, and skip R, S and T entirely. Two vowels and three high-frequency consonants beats four vowels almost every time.

Repeated letters are worth avoiding in an opener for the same reason, but they stop being a problem the moment you have information. Once the board has told you a letter is in the word, a guess that repeats it is testing a real question: is there a second one? Words like LEVEL and ERROR catch out players who assume five distinct letters.

After the first guess the job changes from covering letters to narrowing candidates. Feed what the board told you into the word finder: a confirmed opening letter goes in Starts with, a confirmed final letter in Ends with, yellow letters in Contains, and the length filter stays at five. The Wordle word finder does the same job in the shape of the board, with a box per position and a place to put the letters you have ruled out. If the day gets away from you entirely, the Wordle hint page gives you labelled clues, vaguest first.