Is Entropy Better Than Letter Frequency for Wordle Guesses?

Short answer: yes. Entropy is the better measure because it scores the thing you actually care about: how sharply a guess cuts down the list of possible answers. Letter frequency is a decent proxy that gets you most of the way there with far less effort. The two rankings agree more often than they disagree, and when they part ways it is almost always because frequency has ignored where letters sit or what a repeated letter really contributes.

Letter frequency in one paragraph

Frequency scoring counts how often each letter appears across the answers and rewards guesses built from the common ones. In our curated answer list the letters E, S, A, R, O and L appear most often, so a guess covering several of them is likely to light up tiles. The appeal is obvious: you can hold the six “best” letters in your head and judge any candidate word in seconds, mid-game, with no tools. As a quick filter it thoroughly earns its popularity.

Entropy in one paragraph

Entropy asks a sharper question: if you play this word, how evenly does it split the answers still in play? Every guess sorts the surviving candidates into groups, one group for each colour pattern the game could hand back. A high-entropy guess creates many small groups, so whichever pattern appears, you are left holding a short list. A low-entropy guess piles most answers into one big group and teaches you very little. The result is measured in bits, and each bit roughly halves the field. Our entropy research walks through the method and the full rankings.

Where letter frequency falls over

Frequency treats a letter as equally valuable wherever it lands, and Wordle does not work that way. Greens are position-specific, so an S at the start of a guess and an S at the end interrogate different slices of the answer list. Entropy handles this automatically, because every feedback pattern it counts is defined by where letters sit, not merely whether they appear.

Repeated letters are the bigger trap. Naive frequency scoring happily counts the same letter twice, and because E is the most common letter of all, a word like EERIE looks superb on paper. Measured properly it collapses: EERIE earns 4.32 bits and leaves about 111 possible answers on average, while TARES earns 6.22 bits and leaves around 28. The second and third copies of a letter add almost nothing once the first copy has asked the question.

So which words win when you measure properly? Here are the top openers by entropy, drawn from every valid guess (15,783 words) and scored against the 1,352 answers in the curated list.

Notice the shape the leaders share: no repeated letters, one or two vowels and popular consonants spread across likely positions. Every word in that table would also score well on a plain frequency count, which is the honest defence of the proxy. Common letters and high entropy usually travel together, and the gap only opens when position and repetition come into play.

So which should you use?

Use frequency as your in-game shorthand and entropy for anything you rank in advance. Choosing between two candidate guesses at the keyboard, the one with more common, unrepeated letters is nearly always the right call. For your opening word there is no reason to approximate: our ranked list of starting words is already ordered by entropy, and the Wordle Solver applies the same measurement to every remaining guess as you play. Frequency instinct is also what tempts players into vowel-heavy openers, a habit we tested in should you guess vowels first.