Best Wordle Starting Words (Tested on 1,683 Words)
Your first Wordle guess has one job: tell you as much as possible about the answer. A good opener turns up green and yellow tiles often. A weak one leaves you with five gray squares and nothing to go on.
To find out which openers really work, we tested popular starting words against 1,683 common five-letter English words, the kind of everyday words Wordle tends to use as answers. For each opener we counted how many letters it reveals on average and how often it finds nothing at all.
The short answer
- STARE reveals the most letters overall: 1.86 per guess on average.
- SLATE gets the most green tiles: letters in exactly the right spot.
- ADIEU and AUDIO, two popular “vowel-heavy” openers, finish near the bottom.
How the top openers compare
| Opener | Greens per game | Yellows per game | Letters revealed | Finds nothing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARE | 0.61 | 1.25 | 1.86 | 7.8% |
| LATER | 0.46 | 1.39 | 1.85 | 6.3% |
| ALERT | 0.43 | 1.42 | 1.85 | 6.3% |
| IRATE | 0.53 | 1.32 | 1.85 | 7.2% |
| ARISE | 0.57 | 1.27 | 1.84 | 6.3% |
| RAISE | 0.57 | 1.27 | 1.84 | 6.3% |
| SLATE | 0.65 | 1.11 | 1.76 | 8.0% |
| TRACE | 0.59 | 1.17 | 1.76 | 7.8% |
| CRANE | 0.61 | 1.08 | 1.69 | 9.6% |
| ADIEU | 0.35 | 1.19 | 1.53 | 7.2% |
| AUDIO | 0.25 | 1.09 | 1.34 | 7.8% |
“Letters revealed” counts both green and yellow tiles. “Finds nothing” is how often the opener comes back all gray.
Why STARE and SLATE work so well
The best openers share one trait: they use the letters that appear most often in five-letter words. In our sample of common words:
- E appears in 49% of words
- A appears in 41%
- R appears in 39%
- T appears in 30%
- S and O each appear in 29%
STARE uses five of the six most common letters. That’s why it rarely comes back empty.
SLATE wins on green tiles because its letters sit where they usually appear. S is by far the most common first letter in five-letter words, and E is the most common last letter. Greens are worth more than yellows because they fix a letter in place.
Why ADIEU is overrated
ADIEU is popular because it tests four vowels at once. The trouble is that U and I are much less common than consonants like R, S and T. Almost every word has a vowel, so learning which vowel matters less than you’d think.
AUDIO does even worse. It reveals about 28% fewer letters than STARE, and O and U rarely land in the positions AUDIO puts them.
Pick a second word with five new letters
If your first guess comes back mostly gray, don’t waste guess two on letters you’ve already tried. Choose a common word that uses five different letters:
- After SLATE, try RHINO, CURIO or IRONY.
- After CRANE, try LOTUS, HOIST or SPLIT.
Between them, these pairs test ten of the most useful letters in two guesses.
Watch out for repeated letters
About 30% of common five-letter words have a repeated letter, like SPOON, GEESE or LLAMA. If you’re stuck with only one or two possible letters left, try a word with a double letter.
When Wordle shows the same letter as both yellow and gray, the answer has that letter exactly once. Our Wordle Helper handles this automatically.
Our recommendation
- Start with STARE or SLATE. STARE finds more letters; SLATE finds more greens. Both are excellent.
- Use five new letters on guess two if the first guess is mostly gray.
- Use the clues, not guesswork. Enter your colors in the Wordle Helper to see every word that still fits, ranked by the best next guess.
Want to browse word lists instead? See 5-letter words starting with S, 5-letter words ending in E or every 5-letter word list.
How we tested: We took five-letter words from the ENABLE word list and kept the 1,683 that appear as common dictionary words in WordNet. This approximates the everyday words Wordle uses as answers. Each opener was scored against every word using Wordle’s coloring rules, including the rules for repeated letters.