Most Wordle advice is opinion. This guide is built on a measurement instead. We took all 8,636 five-letter words in our dictionary, played every candidate starting word against every possible answer, and counted how many words would still be possible after the first guess. The numbers below come straight from that test, and they are recalculated whenever our dictionary changes.
How we measured a starting word
After any guess, Wordle gives you a color pattern: green, yellow or gray for each of the five letters. Every possible answer produces exactly one pattern for a given guess. Group the answers by the pattern they produce and you can see how well the guess splits the field. A guess that sorts 8,636 words into many small groups is excellent, because whatever pattern you get, few words remain. A guess that leaves one enormous group is poor.
We summarize that with one number: the expected words remaining, the average size of the group you land in if the answer is picked at random. Lower is better. We also report how many distinct color patterns each guess can produce, a rough measure of how much information it can return.
Popular starting words, tested
| Starter | Expected words left | Distinct patterns | Share of list left |
|---|---|---|---|
| TARES | 196 | 202 | 2.3% |
| RAISE | 226 | 166 | 2.6% |
| STARE | 242 | 168 | 2.8% |
| SLATE | 247 | 184 | 2.9% |
| AROSE | 252 | 153 | 2.9% |
| IRATE | 313 | 156 | 3.6% |
| TRACE | 391 | 171 | 4.5% |
| CRANE | 397 | 161 | 4.6% |
| ADIEU | 436 | 110 | 5.0% |
| AUDIO | 632 | 129 | 7.3% |
Across our full list, the strongest starters we found were LARES (186), RALES (188), TARES (196), ARLES (197), NARES (201). TARES leaves about 196 candidates on average, while CRANE leaves about 397 and ADIEU about 436.
Why CRANE is still a fine choice in the real gameOur list includes every valid five-letter word, plurals and rare words included. Wordle's own answers are a hand-picked set of common words that rarely end in a plural S. On that smaller list, words like CRANE, SLATE and TRACE perform much better than they do here, which is why you see them recommended so often. Plural-friendly starters such as TARES do best when every valid word is in play, so treat this table as a guide to letter value, not a ranking of Wordle's answer list.
Which letters carry the most information
The share of five-letter words containing each letter, from our dictionary: S (46%), E (45%), A (40%), R (31%), O (29%), I (28%), L (25%), T (24%), N (21%), U (18%). A first guess that tests five of the top eight letters will almost always reveal something useful.
Position matters as much as presence. These are the most common letters in each slot:
| Position | Most common letters (share of words) |
|---|---|
| 1 | S (12%), C (8%), B (7%), P (7%) |
| 2 | A (17%), O (15%), E (12%), I (11%) |
| 3 | A (10%), R (9%), I (9%), O (8%) |
| 4 | E (20%), A (8%), T (7%), I (7%) |
| 5 | S (31%), E (11%), Y (10%), D (7%) |
Two things stand out. First, S is the most common first letter and also very common in the last slot, largely because of plurals. Second, vowels dominate positions two and three. A guess that puts A or O second and an R or A third is testing the parts of the word where vowels usually hide.
What ADIEU gets wrong
ADIEU and AUDIO are popular because they test four vowels at once. The trouble is that vowels are not where most of the information is. Nearly every word has one or two vowels, so learning which ones are present narrows the field less than you might expect, and D and U are relatively rare letters to spend the remaining slots on. In our test ADIEU leaves roughly 2.2 times as many candidates as TARES. If you like vowel-heavy openers, follow up with a consonant-heavy second guess.
The second guess
If the first guess comes back mostly gray, the best second guess usually uses five completely new letters. After LARES, a strong follow-up with no overlapping letters is TONDI: it tests the next most common letters in the list. Two guesses together then cover ten of the most frequent letters in English five-letter words.
Once you have a green or yellow letter or two, switch strategy. Instead of covering new letters blindly, look at the candidates that remain (our Wordle Solver lists them) and pick a guess that splits them. The solver ranks the remaining words by how many letters they share with the rest of the pool, which is a good proxy for a guess that will narrow things down.
A worked game
Here is a game played by the simplest possible rule: open with LARES, then always guess the remaining word with the best letter coverage, which is exactly how our solver orders its list. The answer is WATER.
- LARES
75 words still possible. - TAPER
8 words still possible. - WATER
Solved.
Notice how the first guess does the heavy lifting. Most of the work in Wordle is done on guess one; the rest is cleanup.
Duplicate letters, explained once and for all
Wordle colors repeated letters carefully, and misreading them is the most common way to lose a streak. Suppose you guess SPEED and the answer is ABIDE. The answer has one E, so only one of your two Es can be colored. The first E is yellow (E is in the word, but not in position three), and the second E is gray. That gray E does not mean "no E". It means "no second E".
The rule in general: a gray letter caps the count of that letter at the number of green and yellow copies you already have. Our Wordle Solver applies this rule exactly. In that SPEED example it narrows the field to a couple of hundred words, every one of them with exactly one E, and ABIDE is among them.
Escaping pattern traps
Some endings have so many possible first letters that guessing them one at a time can burn all six attempts. From our list:
| Pattern | Words | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| _ATCH | 9 | BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, NATCH, PATCH, RATCH, WATCH |
| _IGHT | 12 | BIGHT, DIGHT, EIGHT, FIGHT, HIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, ... |
| _OUND | 8 | BOUND, FOUND, HOUND, MOUND, POUND, ROUND, SOUND, WOUND |
| _ILLS | 17 | BILLS, DILLS, FILLS, GILLS, HILLS, JILLS, KILLS, MILLS, NILLS, PILLS, ... |
When you are staring at one of these with three guesses left, do not guess the candidates in turn. Spend one guess on a word that tests several of the possible first letters at once, even a word that cannot be the answer. If the candidates for _ATCH include BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH and PATCH, a guess containing B, C, H, L, M and P in any positions will usually leave only one option.
Hard mode
Hard mode forces you to reuse every green and yellow letter in later guesses. That rules out the "spend a guess to eliminate" tactic above, so pattern traps become genuinely dangerous. In hard mode, favor starters with very common letters, and on guess two prioritize placing your yellows in their most likely positions using the position table above.
Questions readers ask
What is the best Wordle starting word?
On our full list of 8,636 five-letter words, LARES and TARES performed best in our test. On Wordle's own curated answer list, common-word starters such as CRANE and SLATE do better. Any of them is a strong choice.
Is ADIEU a good first guess?
It is popular but below average in our test, leaving about 436 candidates on average against about 196 for TARES. Vowels are present in almost every word, so confirming them tells you less than testing common consonants like R, S, T and L.
Should I use the same starting word every day?
Using one strong starter consistently is a good habit. It lets you learn what each color pattern from that word usually means, which speeds up your second guess.
How does Wordle handle repeated letters?
Each letter in your guess is colored against the answer's letter counts. If the answer has one E and you guess two, one E is colored and the other is gray. The gray copy means there is no additional E, not that E is absent.