Best Wordle starting words for a great first guess

Choosing the best Wordle starting words can be a tricky business. Do you pack it with vowels and go for something like AUDIO or ADIEU? Do you go for common consonants and start with STARE or CRATE? Or do you pick randomly each day?

Whatever your approach, a good start word will help you avoid needing to search for today's Wordle answer. A clever opening guess can be the difference between getting the answer in two guesses or losing your streak – so don't mess it up.

I've been playing Wordle since December 2021 and have spent many, many hours digging into the math behind the best starting words, so I can help you improve your game. Here's what you need to know.

Your Wordle expert

Your Wordle expert

Marc McLaren

Marc is TechRadar’s Global Editor in Chief and has been obsessed with Wordle for more than two years. He's authored dozens of articles on the game for TechRadar and its sister site Tom's Guide, including a detailed analysis of the most common letters in Wordle in every position. He's also played every Wordle ever and only lost once and yes, he takes it all too seriously.

The best Wordle starting words overall

Best Wordle starting words – a mathematical approach

It's easy to see why WordleBot picks those six words once you analyze the 2,309 possible solutions that Wordle picks from each day. Or rather, used to pick from – the NYT now also adds in its own 'new' words from time to time, such as SNAFU and GUANA. I've written about this new era for Wordle before, but those extra answers are unlikely to impact the best words in a statistically significant manner.

With that caveat aside, it is possible to dig into the probability of certain letters and words within Wordle, and that's something that I've done for myself in my analysis of every Wordle answer, carried out for Wordle's 1,000 birthday earlier this year.

Among my findings were that the most common letters in the game are (in order) E, A, R, O and T.

Most common letters in Wordle overall

• E (appears in Wordle answers 1,230 times)
• A (975)
• R (897)
• O (753)
• T (729)
• L (716)
• I (670)
• S (668)
• N (573)
• C (475)

The most common starting letters, meanwhile, are S, C, B, T and P. I also looked at the most common letters in position #2, #3, #4 and at the end of an answer. Here are the top 5 letters for each of those categories:

Most common starting letters in Wordle

• S (365)
• C (198)
• B (173)
• P (149)
• T (141)

Most common second letters in Wordle

• A (304)
• O (279)
• R (267)
• E (241)
• I (201)

Most common middle letters in Wordle

• A (306)
• I (266)
• O (243)
• E (177)
• U (165)

Most common fourth letters in Wordle

• E (318)
• N (182)
• S (171)
• A (162)
• L (162)

Most common ending letters in Wordle

• E (422)
• Y (364)
• T (253)
• R (212)
• L (155)

What does this tell us? Well, taking the top letter in each position doesn't help much, as that would give us the word SAAEE, which isn't a real word. But once you discount made-up words you are left with SLATE as your best choice.

Why? Well, you simply add up the number of times each letter appears in each position in an answer. The S gets 365, the L gets 200 and so on. By this method, SLATE has the highest overall score, of 1,432.

You don't need to be good at math to see that it makes sense, either. After all, S is the most common starting letter by far, and all of the other letters are very common throughout the game.

Personally, I prefer a word that includes an R rather than an L, because R also occurs often in -ER words. My favorite for most of the time I've played Wordle was STARE, which WordleBot also likes well enough, giving it a rating of 97/99.

Best Wordle starting words - the MIT verdict

I'm no mathematical genius, though, so to get a real insight into the best Wordle start words, you could see what the real experts say.

For instance, researchers at MIT have published a paper that they say definitively confirms the best Word to start Wordle as… SALET.

If you're not sure what SALET means then you're in good company, because I didn't either. Apparently it's a 15th-century helmet, but more importantly Wordle does accept it as a guess.

SALET performs 1% better than SLATE when it comes to narrowing down the options in Wordle, the researchers say, which gives you a better chance of solving it in your six guesses. In fact, they say someone starting with SALET will solve Wordle in an average of 3.421 guesses.

That said, if you start with SALET each day you'll definitely never score a fabled 1/6, because it's not among Wordle's 2,309 answers. Likewise, CRANE, SLATE, CRATE and TRACE have all been past Wordle answers, so you might want to avoid them for the same reason. I don't know if CARTE and CARET will ever be answers – but I doubt it.

With all that in mind, maybe the best Wordle starting words are STARE, LEAST, TASER and PARSE, all of which score 97 out of 99 from WordleBot, and none of which have yet been answers.

Best Wordle starting words – vowels

Another popular approach is to pack your Wordle start word with vowels. On the one hand this makes sense, as almost all Wordle answers contain at least one of A, E, I, O or U, and identifying them early can help point you in the right direction for what the solution might be.

AUDIO and ADIEU are the most popular start words in the game, with around 12% of all Wordlers choosing that vowel-heavy approach for the first guess.

They're not terrible choices – WordleBot rates them at 80 and 79 out of 99, respectively. However, mathematically there are better options. In fact, the MIT researchers call out AUDIO specifically, stating that it uncovers only 1.320 colored tiles in the first move, whereas SALET typically reveals 1.683 of them.

I'm not a great fan of AUDIO or ADIEU myself, for the reason that vowels don't help you determine the structure of a word as quickly as consonants do. Vowels are not picky about which other letters they pair with, generally – you can put an A or E before or after almost any other letter. In contrast, the likes of S and T are far more likely to sit next to specific other letters. Find one and you have a good hint as to what a second might be.

Either way, please don't start with OUIJA, EQUAL or QUEUE. Yes, they all contain three or four vowels, but they all also have very uncommon letters such as Q or J in them. J is actually the least common letter in the game, featuring in just 27 answers – so that's pretty much just a waste of a letter.

Just don't do it.

Best Wordle starting words – things to avoid

Including duplicate letters in a Wordle start word is generally a bad idea. You want to get as much information as possible from your first guess, so putting two of the same letter in your word won't be as useful as having five different letters.

Plurals should also be avoided. Yes, it is a way to get an S into a word – but Wordle doesn't feature plurals among its answers, so you'll never score a 1/6 that way. S doesn't feature very often at the end of an answer, either, so you'll most likely have to move it if it does appear. This can work later on in a game, particularly if you need to find a narrowing-down option to help you choose between several answers, but it seems a waste to play it on the first guess; just begin with SLATE or STARE instead if you want an S in there.

Finally, I used to advise against choosing a different starting word for each day, and in terms of maximizing your score I still do. But I've been using a random opener each day for almost a year now, and there are benefits in terms of keeping the game fresh.

Sure, it does mean I get many frustrating days when I'm left with several hundred (or even thousand) possible answers for my second guess, and it also means there are times when my start word from a few days ago ends up being the answer, leaving me thinking about what might have been. I'm very unlikely to ever score a 1/6 this way.

On the flip side, it definitely gets me thinking more about strategy, rather than the game becoming a little formulaic. And given that Wordle is now more than 1,000 games old, keeping that joy each day is no easy task. I still love and miss STARE as an opener, but I can't see myself ever going back to playing it now.

Of course not everyone takes it as seriously as me, so ultimately you should do what you enjoy. Well, so long as you don't start with OUIJA.

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