The Best Wordle Starting Words, Tested Against Every Answer
We scored nearly 4,000 opening words by how many answers each leaves. IRATE and RAISE win; popular vowel-heavy openers like ADIEU do badly.
· 3 min read
Everyone has a favourite first guess. Some swear by ADIEU because it tests four vowels at once; others open with CRANE or SLATE. We wanted a number rather than an opinion, so we tested every sensible opener against every plausible answer.
How we measured it
A good first guess is one that tells you as much as possible. After you play it, the colours you get back split the possible answers into groups: every answer that would have produced exactly the same greens, yellows and greys lands in the same group. The smaller those groups are, the fewer words you still have to choose between.
So for each opener we worked out how many possible answers you are left with, on average, after seeing its colours. Lower is better.
- Answers: the 791 everyday five-letter words in our dictionary, leaving out plurals and verb forms ending in S (puzzles of this kind rarely use them as answers).
- Openers: 3,966 five-letter words with five different letters.
- Scoring: repeated letters are marked the way the game marks them, so a letter guessed twice only turns yellow as many times as it appears in the answer.
This is our own answer set, not the game's secret list, so treat the exact figures as a guide. The order shifts a little depending on which words count as possible answers: if plurals are included, openers ending in S such as STARE and RATES move up. What does not change is which letters win: R, T, A, E and S, joined by I or L.
The best openers
| Rank | Opener | Answers left (average) | Letters found (average) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | IRATE | 17.6 | 1.96 |
| 2 | ARISE | 18.4 | 1.90 |
| 3 | RAISE | 18.5 | 1.90 |
| 7 | CRATE | 19.9 | 1.87 |
| 9 | AROSE | 20.2 | 1.89 |
| 10 | TRACE | 20.3 | 1.87 |
| 13 | STARE | 20.5 | 1.94 |
“Letters found” is how many tiles come back green or yellow, on average. A few rare words such as TALER and ARIEL sneak into the top ten too; we've left them out of the table because most people would rather open with a word they know.
IRATE is the best everyday opener we found. It leaves about 17.6 possible answers on average, against roughly 23 for SLATE and CRANE.
Why ADIEU and AUDIO disappoint
| Opener | Answers left (average) | Rank out of 3,966 |
|---|---|---|
| SLATE | 22.6 | 31 |
| CRANE | 22.7 | 34 |
| ADIEU | 39.3 | 888 |
| HOUSE | 45.5 | 1,389 |
| ABOUT | 56.8 | 2,200 |
| AUDIO | 61.0 | 2,461 |
Vowel-heavy openers feel efficient, because almost every answer contains at least one of A, E, I, O and U. That is exactly the problem: finding out that the answer has an A or an E tells you very little, since most answers do. AUDIO leaves over three times as many answers as IRATE.
The best openers pair two or three common vowels with the consonants that split the list most evenly: R, T, S and L. For comparison, the weakest openers in our test were words like JUMPY and BUMPY, which leave more than 200 answers on average.
Putting it to work
- Open with IRATE, RAISE or CRATE. Any of them is within a couple of words of the best possible start.
- Use your second guess to test new letters, not just to place the ones you found. After IRATE, a word like SOUND tests five new common letters.
- Let the solver narrow it down. Enter your guesses and colours in our Wordle Solver; it handles repeated letters properly and ranks what's left by how common each word is.
Five-letter words starting with CR
If you like CRATE and CRANE, here are the everyday five-letter words that start the same way, most common first:
For every five-letter word, see our full list of 5-letter words.