The Best Wordle Starting Words, Ranked by Maths

By expected information gain, TARES tops the ranking at 6.22 bits, narrowing the 1,352 possible answers to roughly 28 on average. Other elite openers include SALET, LARES and TARES, all built from the high-frequency letters S, E, A, R, T and L.

CRANE is a solid, popular opener, but it is not optimal: it ranks well outside the top 100 by entropy and leaves more answers in play than letter-frequency-optimal words like TARES or SALET. It is a fine choice if you prefer a familiar real word.

AUDIO front-loads four vowels but spends only one slot on a consonant, so it misses the high-value letters R, S, T and L that decide most puzzles. It leaves about 112 answers in play, several times more than the best openers, and ranks around #8,010.

Cover one or two vowels in your opener, but not at the expense of common consonants. The best openers pair a couple of vowels (A, E) with high-frequency consonants (R, S, T, L), rather than stacking three or four vowels.

In hard mode your guess must stay consistent with earlier clues, so a strong opener that is itself a possible answer is valuable. Words like TALES, TEARS and RATES top the ranking restricted to possible answers. See the hard-mode table above.

Each candidate word is tested against every one of the 1,352 possible answers. We bucket the answers by the green/yellow/grey feedback the guess would produce, then score the guess by the Shannon entropy of that split (expected information gain) and by the average number of answers it leaves behind.

Our analysis uses 1,352 curated answers. The dictionary of valid guesses is far larger, 15,783 five-letter words, but the daily answer is only ever drawn from the smaller curated set.

Yes. About 31.7% of answers repeat a letter (for example ABBEY or EERIE). This is a frequent reason players eliminate the correct word too early, so it pays to keep duplicate letters in mind once you are down to a few candidates.

The average answer contains about 1.78 vowels. Most answers have one or two, and very few have three or more, which is why heavily vowel-loaded openers waste guesses.

Yes, on average. A higher-entropy opener leaves fewer candidates after the first guess, so you reach the answer in fewer turns over many games. Any single day still depends on luck, but the long-run average improves.

A consistent, strong opener removes guesswork and is what most expert solvers recommend. Rotating openers rarely helps unless you are deliberately playing for fun or chasing a specific letter.

S is the most common first letter by a wide margin, followed by C, B, T and P. That is one reason S-rich openers perform so well.

Use our free Wordle Solver: enter your opener, mark the tiles green, yellow or grey, and it shows every remaining answer plus the best next guess by information gain. No sign-up required.