The Best Starting Words for Wordle-Style Games
In Wordle and similar five-letter guessing games, your first guess has one job: to reveal as much as possible about the hidden word. The best way to do that is to test the letters that appear in the most words. We counted them.
How we measured
We took every five-letter word in WordJumbler's dictionary and removed those ending in S. That matters because daily puzzles rarely use simple plurals, and including them would make S look far more useful than it really is. That left 5,941 words. For each letter, we counted the share of those words that contain it at least once.
The most common letters in five-letter words
| Letter | Appears in |
|---|---|
| E | 48% |
| A | 42% |
| R | 34% |
| O | 30% |
| I | 30% |
| L | 26% |
| T | 26% |
| N | 23% |
| S | 22% |
| D | 20% |
| Y | 19% |
| U | 19% |
| C | 18% |
| P | 15% |
| H | 15% |
E and A are the clear leaders, followed by R, O, I, L and T. A good opening word uses five different letters from the top of this list.
Ranking popular starting words
For each word below, we added up the percentages of its five letters. A higher number means your guess is more likely to hit letters in the answer. This is a simple measure, but it matches the advice of more complex analyses surprisingly well.
| Starting word | Letter coverage score |
|---|---|
| IRATE | 180 |
| AROSE | 176 |
| RAISE | 176 |
| ARISE | 176 |
| ALERT | 176 |
| LATER | 176 |
| STARE | 172 |
| CRATE | 168 |
| TRACE | 168 |
| SLATE | 164 |
| CRANE | 165 |
| ADIEU | 159 |
| AUDIO | 141 |
IRATE comes out on top in our count, with AROSE, RAISE, ARISE, ALERT and LATER close behind. Popular choices like SLATE and CRANE score a little lower on letters alone, but they test letters in common positions (S at the start, E at the end), which also gives useful green tiles.
Vowel-heavy starters like ADIEU and AUDIO are popular, but they score lower. They tell you which vowels are present, but most answers contain only one or two vowels, so you learn less about the consonants that really narrow things down.
Where letters usually go
Position matters as well as presence. These are the most common letters in each position across the same word list:
| Position | Most common letters |
|---|---|
| 1 | S, C, B, A |
| 2 | A, O, E, I |
| 3 | A, I, R, O |
| 4 | E, A, I, N |
| 5 | E, Y, D, R |
Notice how often S, C and B start words, and how E, Y and D finish them. Y is the second most common last letter, which surprises many players.
A simple two-word strategy
- Open with a high-coverage word such as IRATE or AROSE.
- If you get few hits, play a second word with five completely new common letters. After IRATE, try CLOUD or SOUND; after AROSE, try UNTIL. Two guesses then cover ten of the most frequent letters.
- Then solve. From the third guess on, use only words that fit everything you've learned.
Double letters and common endings
Two more facts from the same word list help in the middle of the game:
- About one five-letter word in three has a repeated letter (34% in our count), as in LLAMA, APPLE or GEESE. If you're stuck with few options, consider that a letter you've already found might appear twice.
- The most common endings are -ED and -ER, far ahead of -AL, -LY, -SE, -TY, -CH and -LE. When you have green letters at the end, try these first.
The worst starting words
At the bottom of our ranking are words full of rare letters, such as JUMPY, QUICK, JUMBO, BUXOM and FUNKY. They are fun to play, but as a first guess they test letters that appear in very few answers. Words with repeated letters, like FUZZY or MUMMY, waste a slot by testing the same letter twice.
Should you always use the same opener?
Many players stick to one starting word every day, and there's a good argument for it: you learn what each colour pattern from that word tends to mean, which speeds up your second guess. Others prefer to vary their opener for fun. Statistically, any of the top words in our table will serve you well, so pick the one you find easiest to work with and keep it for a few weeks before judging it.
Use WordJumbler as a helper
Once you know some of the letters, WordJumbler can show every word that fits. Type the letters you know are in the word, add blank tiles (?) for the unknown ones, and set the Length filter to 5. Use Starts with or Ends with if you have green letters at the beginning or end. It's a good way to check your options after you've played, or to learn new five-letter words.