Best Wordle Starting Words: What the Letter Data Says

By WordPlayHQ · Published October 3, 2026 · Updated October 3, 2026 · 6 min read

There is no single best Wordle starting word, but the strongest openers share a pattern: five different letters taken from E, A, R, T, L, S, N, O and I. MIT researchers found SALET to be the best opener on Wordle's original word lists, and in our own test RAISE came out on top. Anything in that family is a good choice.

What is the best first word in Wordle?

The most cited answer comes from MIT. Dimitris Bertsimas and Alex Paskov used exact dynamic programming on Wordle's original lists, 2,315 possible answers and 10,657 other allowed guesses, and found that SALET is the best opener. Played perfectly from there, it solves the puzzle in 3.421 guesses on average and never needs more than five, according to MIT Sloan's write-up. SALET is an unusual word, though, and it is not even in the dictionary behind our tools, which is why most players reach for something more familiar.

That raises a practical question: among ordinary words, which opener does best? We ran the numbers on our own dictionary to find out.

How do you measure a good starting word?

A good opener cuts the list of possible answers down as far as it can, whatever the answer turns out to be. To score that, we took every five-letter word in our list, treated each one as a possible answer, and worked out the color pattern each guess would produce. The score is the average number of words still possible once you see the colors, so lower is better. If you open with RAISE and the answer is picked at random from our list, you would expect about 64 candidates to remain.

Our dictionary holds 3,568 five-letter words, but 1,185 of them are plural forms or Roman numerals that Wordle never uses as answers. We removed those, which leaves 2,383 words. The section on word lists below explains why that step matters so much.

Which letters show up most in five-letter words?

This table shows the share of the 2,383 words that contain each letter at least once.

Position matters as well. S is the most common first letter at 15.2%, and E is the most common fourth letter at 23.6%. The most common last letters are E (16.6%), D (14.4%) and Y (13.2%). Letter frequency on its own is only a rough guide, because it ignores how letters combine inside real words, so we also scored whole words against the full list.

Which opening words come out on top?

Here are the ten best openers in our test. "Worst case" is the biggest group of words that could remain after one guess, which shows how bad an unlucky result can be.

Every word in the top ten uses five different letters from E, A, R, T, L, S, N, O and I. Several are anagrams of each other: ALTER and LATER, and RAISE and ARISE. Their scores are close but not identical, because where a letter sits in the word changes which clues the colors give you.

How do popular openers like CRANE, SLATE and AUDIO compare?

Out of 2,383 candidate openers, here is where some well-known choices landed.

The gap between the best and the popular picks is small. CRANE and SLATE leave about 84 and 81 words, not far from RAISE at 64. AUDIO is the outlier. Despite clearing four vowels in one guess, it leaves about 170 words, more than two and a half times as many as RAISE, because vowels alone give weaker clues than a mix of vowels and common consonants like R, T, L and S.

As a rough sanity check, MIT reports that AUDIO reveals 1.320 colored tiles on average in the real game, and our test gives about 1.37. The lists differ, so the numbers are not directly comparable, but the method behaves sensibly.

Is a two-word opener better than a single starting word?

Some players commit to two fixed openers, whatever colors the first one returns. Among pairings of the 150 strongest single openers, the best pair we found was SOLED followed by TRAIN, which leaves about 5 candidates on average out of 2,383. STOLE followed by DRAIN is close behind at 5.5.

That is a huge reduction, but it costs you two guesses, and it is only the best of the combinations we searched, not a proven optimum. In real play you can usually do better by choosing your second word based on the colors you actually got.

Why does the word list matter so much?

Our dictionary includes plurals, and they distort the results badly. Before filtering, S appeared in half of all five-letter words and a third of them ended in S, so the top openers came out as TALES, RATES and REALS. Those look great against our list, but they would waste a guess in Wordle, where the answer list does not include plurals ending in S or ES, as TechRadar notes. After removing plurals, S dropped to about 26% of words and the winner changed to RAISE.

The same trap applies to any "best starter" ranking you read: it is only as good as the answer list behind it. Wordle's original list was compiled by Josh Wardle and his partner Palak Shah, who chose 2,315 answers and about 10,000 more words accepted only as guesses. The New York Times, which acquired the game in January 2022, has since removed a handful of words from the answer list, so published rankings can drift over time.

Our list is not Wordle's official one, so treat these numbers as a guide to how letters behave, not a guarantee for the real game. For the real game, the MIT result is the best reference.

How did we run the numbers?

We used the 2,383 five-letter words described above as both the possible answers and the allowed guesses. For every guess and every answer we worked out the color pattern using Wordle's standard rules for repeated letters, grouped answers by pattern, and averaged the size of the group each answer lands in. That average is the "average words left" figure in the tables. Pairs were scored the same way using the combined patterns from both guesses.

How should you choose your own starting word?

• Use five different letters. A repeated letter wastes a slot that could test a new one.
• Mix vowels with common consonants. Two or three vowels plus letters like R, T, L, S and N did best in our test.
• Pick a word you will remember. The gap between the top 30 or so openers is small, so a comfortable choice beats chasing a tiny edge.
• Spend your effort on guess two. After the first colors come back, the next guess matters more than the opener.

The same letter-frequency logic explains why E, A, R and T lead here, and it is the idea behind Scrabble's tile values too. If you also play the four-board version, our look at Quordle versus Wordle covers how the strategy changes. And when you are stuck after your opening guess, the Wordle Solver lists every word that still fits your colors.

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