Is SOARE Really the Best Wordle Opener?

Short answer: no. SOARE is the most famous opening word in Wordle folklore, the pick that solver bots made fashionable, but on our data it cannot claim the crown for a blunt reason: it is not in our valid-guess list at all. We rank openers by scoring every one of our 15,783 valid guesses against the curated answer list of 1,352answers, and the top of that table belongs to TARES. SOARE holds no rank on our metric because our curated dictionary does not accept it as a playable word. That does not make the bots wrong. It makes the question badly posed, because “best” always depends on whose word list you are playing with.

Where SOARE’s fame comes from

SOARE is an obscure historical word, usually glossed as a young hawk, and it has not seen everyday use for centuries. It became a celebrity anyway. The original Wordle dictionary accepted it as a guess, and the bot-era analyses that ranked every legal guess by how well it splits the answer pool kept surfacing it near the top. The reasoning was sound. S, O, A, R and E are five heavily used letters with no repeats, and together they interrogate the vowels and the most common consonant frame of English five-letter words in a single move.

The catch is that every opener ranking is relative to two lists, the guesses you are allowed to play and the answers you might face. Change either list and the ranking moves. Our numbers come from the curated lists our own game and solver run on, and SOARE is simply not in them. A “best opener” your dictionary refuses to accept is not the best opener. It is a trivia answer.

SOARE against the modern favourites

Here is how the famous names compare on our data. TARES is the classic entropy pick, SALET is a favourite of exhaustive solver analyses, and SLATE is the human-friendly default many strong players swear by. Entropy measures how much information the opening guess yields on average, and the final column shows each word’s position in our full ranking of every valid guess.

Two things stand out. First, the winner on our metric is TARES, ranked #1 by entropy and leaving roughly 28 candidate answers on average. Second, the pack is tight. TARES beats SLATE by about 0.17 bits, a margin worth far less than a whole extra guess. SOARE shares four of its five letters with TARES, so even on dictionaries that accept it there is no reason to expect magic from it that TARES does not already deliver. Its fame rests on rankings computed over a larger and laxer guess list than ours, and quoting those numbers as if they were universal is how word-game folklore gets made.

An opener that can never be the answer is fine

The other charge against SOARE is that it can never be the day’s answer. Curated answer lists stick to words people actually know, and an obscure hawking term does not qualify. That is true, and it barely matters. Your opening guess is not trying to win the game. The chance of hitting the answer blind on the first turn is 1 in 1,352, so an answer-ineligible opener sacrifices almost nothing. The job of a first guess is to gather information, and bits do not care whether the guess itself could win.

Our own table proves the point. None of TARES, SALET or SLATE appears in the curated answer list either, and TARES still tops the ranking. If you prefer openers that could themselves be the answer, we score a separate answer-only pool in our research, but you are trading real information for a nearly worthless lottery ticket.

The verdict

Is SOARE really the best Wordle opener? Not here. On our metric the crown belongs to TARES, with SALET close behind at #4 and SLATE a perfectly respectable #16. SOARE sits nowhere because it is not a playable word in our dictionary, and that is the quiet lesson of the whole debate: rankings are only as portable as the word lists behind them, so trust the ones that tell you which lists they used. Ours are set out in full in our ranking of the best Wordle starting words, and our entropy research explains exactly how the bits column is measured. Open with TARES or SLATE, and save SOARE for the pub quiz.