Best Wordle Starting Words
Ranked by how many green and yellow tiles a word earns, on average, against 1,671 common five-letter words. Numbers, not opinion.
Computed 2026-10-20 from our own word list
The top 15 openers
Five different letters each
| # | Word | Tiles | Green | Yellow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | irate | 1.86 | 0.51 | 1.35 |
| 2 | latercommon | 1.83 | 0.50 | 1.34 |
| 3 | altercommon | 1.83 | 0.45 | 1.38 |
| 4 | alertcommon | 1.83 | 0.38 | 1.45 |
| 5 | arosecommon | 1.83 | 0.53 | 1.30 |
| 6 | starecommon | 1.83 | 0.58 | 1.25 |
| 7 | ratescommon | 1.83 | 0.42 | 1.41 |
| 8 | tearscommon | 1.83 | 0.39 | 1.44 |
| 9 | aster | 1.83 | 0.38 | 1.45 |
| 10 | arielcommon | 1.82 | 0.51 | 1.31 |
| 11 | raisecommon | 1.82 | 0.56 | 1.26 |
| 12 | arisecommon | 1.82 | 0.55 | 1.28 |
| 13 | lasercommon | 1.80 | 0.47 | 1.32 |
| 14 | reals | 1.80 | 0.37 | 1.43 |
| 15 | earls | 1.80 | 0.32 | 1.48 |
“Tiles” is the average number of colored tiles the word earns as a first guess. IRATE gives you about 1.9 of its five tiles colored on a typical day: roughly 0.5 green and 1.4 yellow. The gap between first and fifteenth is small; the gap between any of these and a random word is not.
Want to see what your opener leaves open? Play it in the Wordle Solver, mark the colors, and watch the list shrink.
Letters worth guessing first
Share of common words containing the letter
By position
- Letter 1: S 15% · C 9% · B 8% · T 7% · P 6%
- Letter 2: A 14% · O 13% · R 12% · E 11% · I 10%
- Letter 3: A 13% · I 11% · O 9% · E 8% · R 8%
- Letter 4: E 17% · N 8% · S 7% · C 7% · I 7%
- Letter 5: E 19% · Y 13% · D 10% · T 10% · R 9%
The hardest common words
Rare letters, repeated letters
- fuzzydouble letter
- buffydouble letter
- buggydouble letter
- jumbo
- mummydouble letter
- yummydouble letter
- funky
- puppydouble letter
- hubbydouble letter
- chuckdouble letter
- bulky
- bluffdouble letter
- dummydouble letter
- muddydouble letter
- whiffdouble letter
- juicy
- dizzydouble letter
- goofydouble letter
- husky
- gypsydouble letter
These are everyday words whose letters share the least with the rest of the list, so an opener built on E, A, R and T tells you almost nothing about them. Most also repeat a letter, which is the other classic trap: the double letter you don’t think to try.
How we computed this
We took every five-letter word from a public-domain English word list and kept the 1,671 common enough to be an answer: frequent in everyday writing, and not a plural ending in S, which the game avoids. For each possible opener we counted, across all those words, how often each of its letters lands in the right spot (green) or elsewhere in the word (yellow), and added the two averages.
No official answer list was used, and none of this knows today’s word. It is a measurement of English, not a spoiler. Source: ENABLE word list (public domain) + wordfreq (en).
Questions people ask
Is there one best Wordle starting word?
Not a single one everyone agrees on, because it depends on what you measure. By expected colored tiles against common words, IRATE, LATER and ALTER sit at the top and are within a hair of each other. Any word in the top ten is a fine opener; consistency matters more than the exact pick.
Should my starting word have five different letters?
Yes. A repeated letter can only tell you about one letter, so it wastes a tile. Every word in our ranking has five different letters for that reason.
Why not just use the official answer list?
The list of past and future Wordle answers belongs to the publisher, and leaning on it would also spoil the game. We rank against common English five-letter words instead, which is the same pool the answers come from, without knowing which ones they are.
Which letters should I guess first?
E, A, R, O and T appear in the most words, in that order. S is by far the most common first letter and E the most common last one, which is why the top openers look the way they do.