Backtest your Wordle opening word

Everyone has a favourite opener and an argument for why it’s good. This settles it against evidence: type a word and we replay it against every Wordle the New York Times has actually published, then report what it would have left you with.

What “candidates left” means

Type an opener into Wordle and you get five coloured tiles back. Those tiles rule out a great many words — the ones left over are the answers still consistent with what you now know. That leftover count is the number that decides how hard the rest of your solve is, and it is the only opener metric that survives contact with real puzzles.

Lower is better. An opener averaging 60 leaves you a much easier second guess than one averaging 120, and the gap compounds: a bad opener does not just cost you turn one, it costs you the information you needed for turns two and three. This is also why raw green count is a poor way to judge an opener — a word can score greens often and still leave the field wide open.

How the backtest works

For every puzzle in our archive we compute the exact tile pattern your word would have produced against that day’s answer, then count how many candidate words share that pattern. The candidate set is NYT’s original 2,309-word answer list plus every answer they have since used from outside it — a distinction that matters more than it sounds, and which we picked apart on the answer pool page.

Today’s puzzle is excluded, so nothing here can spoil the one you are still playing. If you want the reasoning behind which openers rank well in the first place, that is the best starting words breakdown; if you want to know which answers punished every opener equally, see the hardest answers.