- We're not here to judge how you play Wordle.
Maybe you're like us, picking a random five-letter word
from the depths of your brain and seeing where it takes you.
But if you're the kind of person who needs to win
under any circumstances, well, welcome to the thunderdome!
We're here to talk about Wordle starting word strategy
which is the one way to game Wordle
that doesn't feel like outright cheating.
So, let's get into it.
You've got 26 letters in the alphabet.
Of those, five (plus the letter Y, at times) are vowels.
The basic building blocks for most words.
So, at a very basic level,
any five-letter combination that helps you rule out
more vowels early is going to trim down possible answers.
With that in mind,
we can immediately pick out a few ideal starting words.
There are others, but ADIEU, AUDIO,
and OUIJA all cover four vowels.
You won't know if any yellow
or green letters appear twice,
but you can at least eliminate some critical letters
right at the start.
And that's good enough for most people.
But it's also not that simple
since not every letter is created equally.
Yes, vowels appear in basically every word,
but some are more or less common.
The same goes for consonants.
And then there's also the matter of the Wordle dictionary.
There are more than 10,000 words
the game will recognize as allowable guesses.
But there's a much smaller list of words,
only a few thousand, that qualify as possible solutions.
And the New York Times even trimmed down
that solution list when it acquired Wordle.
So, while you could use a more obscure word like AUREI -
the plural form of aureus, an ancient Roman gold coin -
for a guess, it's not going to be the day's answer.
If going vowel-heavy isn't enough and you want to cover
some of the more common consonants, as well,
RAISE is an ideal starting word
since it covers the three most common vowels
and the two most common consonants
as they appear in dictionaries.
What is the best Wordle starting word really?
If you don't want to risk feeling like you're cheating
Wordle, you might want to stop watching now.
Okay, cool, you're still watching.
The strategies we've walked through thus far
will give you an edge,
but if you want to dive deeper down the rabbit hole,
a mathematician and computer scientist named Grant Sanderson
made an excellent video on the topic.
In it, Sanderson applied his knowledge
of information theory to Wordle
and he coded some testing programs that measure things,
like letter frequency, to determine the best
of the best starting words.
It's a dense 30 minutes of explanation
that's heavy on the math talk,
but Sanderson's friendly demeanor and willingness
to take the time necessary to break down complex ideas
makes it a must watch for Wordle die-hards.
So yes, go watch it.
But the ultimate takeaway leaves us with CRANE
as the best Wordle starting word.
But don't get too confident.
It's not that simple.
Because Sanderson's breakdown focuses on letter frequency,
Crane is just the first stage of information gathering.
It's only the best if you use what you know
about the right and wrong letters in that first word
to inform a perfect second guess.
Is your head swimming yet?
Are you ready to go back
to guessing a random word every time?
Wait, because we're not even close to done yet.
Sanderson dropped another video a week after
the first one titled, "Oh, wait,
actually the best Wordle opener is not 'CRANE'."
Turns out there was a bug in his original test program,
but he says right up front
that the bug "affects a very small percentage of cases,"
so it doesn't totally undermine all the lessons
from the first video.
Without getting too much into the heavy math,
the bug relates specifically to solutions
that have multiples of the same letter
and how Wordle handles that.
Sanderson felt the need to put out a second video
because even though very little of the takeaways
from the original video change,
the final conclusion is affected.
With that in mind,
Sanderson's updated ideal starting word is SALET,
an alternate spelling for sallet,
which was a type of helmet worn during the Middle Ages.
That said, TRACE and CRATE work nearly as well,
especially since they're both
actually potential Wordle solutions.
But keep in mind, one of the most important takeaways
from all this math is actually really simple.
Your first guess is only strong
in the context of the guesses that follow.
That's the whole game of Wordle in a nutshell,
but, BUT there's another school of thought
on how to approach solving Wordle.
Strap in, here we go.
Instead of playing it
as intended, using each previous guess
to inform the next one, you could stick
to the letter frequency game and try to rule out
the most common letters, consonants, and vowels both
up front, irrespective of any clues you pick up.
This approach effectively wastes
your starting stretch of guesses on locked in choices
that are meant to narrow down the number of possible letters
you have to work with.
Just know that if you play Wordle in hard mode,
this strategy won't work since each successive guess
needs to include any letters that are confirmed to be
in the solution by the previous guess.
Is there a best Wordle starting word
that doesn't go so hard on all the math?
All this is getting ridiculously complicated for a game
about five-letter words.
For those who don't want to dive into math land,
YouTuber Bentellect has a short, sweet breakdown
of his starting strategy.
RATIO first, then MENDS, then LUCKY.
That's it.
With those three choices,
you'll have slimmed down the list of possible letters
to the point that figuring out the solution
with your final guesses become significantly easier.
It's not a surefire winning strategy for every day's puzzle.
And there are other similar combos that might work
like SCALY, GUIDE, and THORN.
But the premise is the same, though.
You're narrowing down the list of possible letters
that could appear in the solution
by casting the widest net possible, alphabetically speaking,
with your first three guesses.
So there you have it.
There's no single perfect starting guess for Wordle.
There are lots of them.
You can keep guessing random words first
but if you want to win at any cost, hopefully this rundown
of what works best will get you closer
to climbing that daily streak into the triple digits.