The 20 best Wordle starting words

Ranked by raw letter coverage across the 2,309-word NYT solution pool, broken-out methodology, and honest call-outs on the openers most experts argue about: SALET, CRANE, STARE, RAISE, ROATE, SLATE, TRACE.

The methodology

We score every legal Wordle guess by one number: the sum of the overall letter-frequency percentages for the unique letters it contains. A word with five different letters that each appear in 9 percent of solution slots scores 45. A word that doubles a letter (or doubles a vowel) only counts that letter once, because the second occurrence eliminates nothing new.

When two words tie on coverage, we break the tie by Zipf frequency — how common the word is in everyday English. That keeps words you’ve actually heard of ahead of obscure crossword fillers like REALO or AEROS. The tie-breaker is the only place “is this a real word” enters the math; the underlying coverage ranking is pure information-theoretic and reproducible from the bundled NYT solution list.

The top-5 letters in the solution pool, in order, are E (10.7 percent), A (8.5), R (7.8), O (6.5), and T (6.3). Any opener that contains four or five of those five letters is going to land in the top-20. There is no magic formula — just counting.

The top 20

Coverage = sum of letter-frequency percentages across unique letters. Zipf = common-English frequency, 0 if outside the standard corpus. Expected greens = average number of greens this opener produces across the solution pool.
#	Word	Coverage	Zipf	E[greens]
1	ORATE	39.71	1.49	0.51
2	OATER	39.71	—	0.43
3	ROATE	39.71	—	0.54
4	REALO	39.59	—	0.38
5	LATER	39.39	5.49	0.45
6	ALERT	39.39	4.33	0.40
7	ALTER	39.39	4.05	0.42
8	TALER	39.39	1.51	0.47
9	ARTEL	39.39	1.40	0.43
10	RATEL	39.39	1.25	0.43
11	AROSE	39.18	3.73	0.54
12	AEROS	39.18	1.63	0.31
13	SOARE	39.18	1.20	0.66
14	RETIA	38.99	—	0.29
15	IRATE	38.99	2.78	0.51
16	TERAI	38.99	2.00	0.31
17	RESAT	38.97	—	0.36
18	RATES	38.97	4.88	0.38
19	TEARS	38.97	4.47	0.38
20	STARE	38.97	3.91	0.57

The top three (ORATE, OATER, ROATE) are all anagrams of the same five letters. That’s not a coincidence — raw coverage doesn’t care about order, so any word built from the five highest-frequency letters ties at the top. Among the ties, the one with the highest Zipf wins; everything else is essentially noise.

The seven openers people argue about

None of these is dramatically better than the others. The gap between the best opener and the 20th-best is roughly a tenth of a guess, averaged across the solution pool. The interesting question isn’t which one is mathematically optimal — it’s which one fits your second-guess habits.

salet

coverage 37.40 · zipf —

Information-theory's pick for the single optimal opener. Splits the remaining solution space more evenly than any other word in the dictionary, which is the metric that matters when you're computing the minimum expected number of guesses to solve any puzzle. The catch: SALET is an obscure word (a light helmet from medieval armor) and most players have never heard of it. If you can remember it, it's mathematically the best. If you can't, the next 20 picks are within a rounding error of the same expected score.

Second guess: After SALET, a common second guess is CORNI or COURT — both cover the C-O-N-R-U letters SALET doesn't touch.

crane

coverage 35.95 · zipf 3.92

Popular and respectable. Misses S, T, and L — all top-10 letters — which is why it ranks lower than the STARE/AROSE family on raw coverage. The case for CRANE is that C is a discriminating letter (uncommon enough that confirming or eliminating it is high-value) and the word is memorable. Real but small downside.

Second guess: Pair with SLOTH or PILOT to sweep the missing common letters.

trace

coverage 37.30 · zipf 4.19

Same coverage profile as CRANE — same five letters in a different order. Identical opening value; the choice between TRACE and CRANE is aesthetic.

Second guess: Same as CRANE — SLOTH or PILOT second.

raise

coverage 38.46 · zipf 4.75

Top-tier on raw coverage and easy to remember. Hits five of the top-8 letters (R, A, I, S, E). The minor downside is that two of those (A and I) are vowels, so the consonant discrimination is slightly weaker than openers like STARE that go three-consonants-and-two-vowels.

Second guess: POUCH and CLOUD are good follow-ups; both cover the high-value consonants RAISE misses.

slate

coverage 37.40 · zipf 3.82

Old favorite. Covers S, L, A, T, E — five of the top-9 letters in the solution pool. Practically interchangeable with STARE for opening value.

Second guess: Try CHORD or POUND second — both add the consonants you're missing without doubling up.

roate

coverage 39.71 · zipf —

Ranks top-3 on raw letter coverage and is one of the words information-theory analyses often surface as near-optimal. It's also not a real English word that most players recognize (it's an obsolete spelling of "rote"). Great if you've memorized it; not worth learning if you haven't.

Second guess: SLUMP or PILED to sweep the missing consonants.

stare

coverage 38.97 · zipf 3.91

Our pick if you want one opener to remember. Top-20 on raw coverage, easy to spell, no obscure letters, and the consonant-vowel mix (S-T-R consonants, A-E vowels) sets up clean follow-ups in almost every direction.

Second guess: CLOUD, POUND, or PILOT — pick whichever you remember faster.

What about ADIEU and the vowel-first crowd?

Vowel-stacking openers like ADIEU, AUDIO, and OUIJA score badly on raw letter coverage because three of their five slots are spent on the smallest alphabet in English. ADIEU ranks 1,378th. AUDIO ranks 3,995th.

They’re still useful in one specific spot: when your first guess returns zero vowels. Then a vowel-stacking second guess tells you in one move which uncommon vowel the answer uses, which is the highest-value information you can buy at that point. Otherwise, opening with ADIEU is a deliberate tradeoff — you’re prioritizing vowel discovery over consonant discrimination, and the consonant discrimination is what mostly cracks Wordle solutions.

Vowel-forward openers worth knowing, in case your first guess comes back vowelless:

adieu
audio
ouija
queue

The honest answer

Pick one good opener and stick with it. The accumulated benefit of pattern-matching the same five colored tiles every day — knowing instantly which solutions are still possible after seeing “STARE returns yellow-gray-gray- yellow-green” — matters far more than the 0.05-guess theoretical edge of switching openers.

If you don’t have a favorite yet, the boring honest pick is STARE. It’s a real word everyone knows, ranks top-20 on coverage, and the consonant-vowel mix sets up clean second guesses no matter what the tiles tell you. We’d rather be 95 percent as good every day than 100 percent as good on the rare day you remember to type SALET.

The deeper strategy stuff — second-guess planning, elimination logic, when to burn a turn for pure information — lives in our full Wordle strategy guide. If you’d rather skip the theory and just get the opener for today’s puzzle, the wrdlcheat hint tool picks one for you based on how many turns you want to solve in.

Sometimes the puzzle defeats even a perfect opener — see the ten Wordle answers that broke the most streaks for examples. And for the answer to any past puzzle, the full archive is one click away. There’s also a separate short essay on whether using a Wordle helper is cheating — which, for the record, we don’t think it is.