Everyone who plays Wordle-style games has a favourite first word. Some swear by ADIEU because it tests four vowels at once. Others start with a different word every day, just for fun. And then there are the people who’ve read online that the “perfect” opener is some strange word they’ve never heard of.
So which starting words really are best? We ran the numbers using the word lists inside our own Wordle Sleuth solver – 2,375 possible answers – and some of the results surprised us.
What makes a good first guess?
Your first guess is very unlikely to be right – with 2,375 possible answers, the odds are about 1 in 2,400. So its real job isn’t to win. Its job is to cut the list of possible answers down as far as possible, so your second and third guesses have a much easier task.
A good opener does this in two ways. It uses common letters, so it’s likely to light up some yellows and greens. And it has five different letters, so no space is wasted testing the same letter twice.
To compare words fairly, we worked out how many possible answers you’d have left, on average, after playing each one. The fewer left, the better the word.
The results
| Starting word | Average answers left | Worst case | Could it be the answer? |
|---|---|---|---|
| RAISE | 63 | 174 | Yes |
| IRATE | 66 | 201 | Yes |
| ARISE | 66 | 174 | Yes |
| SLATE | 74 | 229 | Yes |
| STARE | 74 | 235 | Yes |
| CRATE | 76 | 255 | Yes |
| TRACE | 77 | 255 | Yes |
| CRANE | 82 | 273 | Yes |
| GREAT | 100 | 285 | Yes |
| ADIEU | 126 | 289 | No |
| HOUSE | 132 | 334 | Yes |
| AUDIO | 187 | 443 | Yes |
| FUZZY | 877 | 1,387 | Yes |
“Worst case” is the most answers you could be left with if the colours went badly for you.
The top of the table is crowded: RAISE, IRATE, ARISE, SLATE and friends are all within a few words of each other. Any of them is an excellent choice. The real gap opens up further down.
Why ADIEU and AUDIO aren’t as good as they seem
Vowel-heavy starters are hugely popular, and the thinking makes sense: almost every word has a vowel, so why not find out which ones it has straight away?
The problem is that vowels don’t tell you enough on their own. Knowing a word has an A and an E still leaves hundreds of options. The consonants – especially R, S, T, L and N – are what really separate one word from another. That’s why ADIEU leaves twice as many possibilities as RAISE on average, and AUDIO leaves three times as many.
RAISE is a good compromise: it still tests three vowels (A, I and E), but also includes two of the most useful consonants.
The letters that matter most
Here’s how often each of the most common letters appears in the 2,375 answers:
| Letter | E | A | R | O | T | I | L | S | N |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Appears in | 45% | 39% | 36% | 29% | 29% | 28% | 28% | 27% | 24% |
At the other end, J, Q, X and Z each appear in fewer than 40 answers. That’s why FUZZY sits at the bottom of our table: two Zs and a Y tell you almost nothing.
Position matters too. Answers most often start with S, C, B or T, and most often end with E, Y or T.
The S trap
This is the finding that surprises most people. S is a great letter to test – but think carefully about where you put it.
S is the most common first letter of an answer: 374 answers begin with it. But only 40 answers end in S. That’s because Wordle-style answer lists mostly leave out simple plurals like TEARS or CARDS, even though the game happily accepts them as guesses. In fact, nearly a quarter of all accepted guesses end in S.
So an opener like TEARS spends its last tile testing a letter in a spot where it almost never appears. Move the S to the front – STARE, SLATE – and the same letters work much harder for you.
What about those strange “perfect” words?
You may have seen claims that the best opener is something like TARSE, SOARE or ROATE. By the maths, they are slightly better at narrowing things down. TARSE is the top choice in our solver.
But the difference is tiny, and these words have a downside: they’re accepted as guesses but aren’t on the answer list, so they can never win the game. RAISE scores almost exactly as well, and it could be the answer. For most players, that’s the better deal.
Try a two-word opening
Many keen players use the same two words every day: their usual opener, then a second word with five completely fresh letters. It’s simple, it’s easy to remember, and it’s remarkably powerful. Here’s how many answers are left, on average, after some of the best pairs we found:
| First word | Second word | Average answers left |
|---|---|---|
| SLATE | MINOR | About 5 |
| RAISE | CLOTH | About 5 |
| CRANE | SPLIT | About 5 |
| ADIEU | STORY | About 9 |
After just two guesses, you’re usually choosing between a handful of words – and you still have four rows left. The catch is that if you play in “hard mode”, you must use any letters you’ve already found, so a fixed second word won’t always be allowed.
Even so, you don’t have to play the same second word every day. If your first guess gives you lots of greens and yellows, it’s often better to use them straight away.
Our recommendations
- Best all-rounder: RAISE. Top of our table among words that can actually win.
- Great alternatives: IRATE, ARISE, SLATE, STARE, CRATE and TRACE. Pick whichever you like – the differences are tiny.
- Best two-word openings: SLATE then MINOR, RAISE then CLOTH, or CRANE then SPLIT.
- Worth avoiding: words with repeated letters, rare letters like J, Q, X and Z, and plurals ending in S.
And remember – the “best” word is only best on average. A favourite word you enjoy playing every morning is a perfectly good choice too. Puzzles are meant to be fun.
What about longer words?
The same ideas work for six-, seven- and eight-letter versions: common letters, no repeats, and test the most likely word endings. Wordle Sleuth’s favourite openers for longer answers include PARTIES for seven letters, CALORIES and ARTICLES for eight, and PENALTIES for nine.
Test your own favourite
Curious how your go-to word compares? Open Wordle Sleuth and look at the “Best opening guess” list, or type in your own word after a game to see how much it narrowed things down. Playing several boards at once? Wordle Multi suggests the best guess across all of them.
How we worked this out
For each starting word, we compared it against all 2,375 words on the answer list used by Wordle Sleuth (the original list plus every past answer). For each possible answer, we worked out what colors the starting word would show, then grouped together the answers that would give the same colors. The “average answers left” is how big your group would be on average. The fewer words left, the more useful the guess. The two-word figures work the same way, using the colors from both guesses together.
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