Best Wordle start words to help you keep your streak

The best Wordle start words are the key to beating the game and avoiding the need to search for today’s Wordle answer.

Without a good start word, your streak is at risk — and nobody wants to lose all that hard wordle work. Plus, even if you’re a bit of a Wordle expert by now, having a great start word will help you turn 4/6s into 3/6s (possibly even 2/6s). Even the NYT’s brilliant WordleBot tool — sadly now behind a paywall — recognizes the importance of a good start word.

I’ve written before about how I’ve played every Wordle so far and lost only once, and No. 1 on my list of tips is to use a good starting word. So that’s what I’ll discuss here.

Read on and I’ll explain what the best Wordle start words are, the math behind them and what alternatives to try. And also check out Worlde: The Party Game(opens in new tab), a new board game coming this fall you can pre-order now.

Best Wordle start words: Most common letters

Before we dive into the list of the words, let’s break down the science behind it.

You don’t have to be a genius to realize that it’s a good idea to use letters that occur more frequently in English. For example, you’re more likely to find an “A” in the word than a “Z.”

In a research paper on English Letter Frequency Counts(opens in new tab), Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, analyzed the data from Google Books to put together a list of most commonly used letters in the English language. His findings concluded that “E”, “T” and “A” were the top three, while “J”, “Q” and “Z” were the least common.

However, that list is based on words in general, rather than Wordle answers — so to really find out which letters feature most frequently in the game, you’d need to analyze them all.

Fortunately, that’s easy to do. Because Wordle’s answers are all freely available in the website’s HTML code, it’s pretty simple to download them, then do a bit of number crunching. This is the list of most most frequently used letters that you get when you do that:

Note that the list above is based on correct Wordle answers, rather than Wordle words; the game accepts some 12,000-plus words as guesses, but only 2,309 are valid solutions.

That’s interesting, then, but it’s just the appetizer for the best Wordle start word main course to follow…

What are the best Wordle start words?

Several people have attempted to use math to determine the best Wordle start words.

One of them was programmer and game designer Tyler Glaiel(opens in new tab), who assigned each letter in Wordle’s 12,972 possible guesses a score of 0, 1 or 2, based on whether it is included in one of the 2,309 answers or not, and whether it is in the right place.

After checking all 12,972 words, the algorithm determined that the best starting options are:

SOARE
ROATE
RAISE

For reasons that are too complex to go into here, Glaiel concludes that ROATE is the best Wordle start word if you want to rule out possible answers as quickly as possible.

However, because ROATE doesn’t actually feature in Wordle’s possible answers list itself, you’ll never get a 1/6 with it. For that reason, Glaiel recommends starting with RAISE.

Programmer Bertrand Fan took a similar approach(opens in new tab) and unsurprisingly came up with a very similar list:

SOARE
SAREE
SEARE
STARE
ROATE

Given that the top three don’t feature in Wordle’s possible answers list, that would make STARE the statistically best Wordle start word, based on Fan’s analysis at least.

Coincidentally, Stare is the word independently picked by some of the Tom’s Guide team months ago, without having seen that research, so that’s the one we’d go for.

That decision was instead based on common sense; after all, S is the most common first letter among Wordle answers, A is the most common third letter and E the most common fifth letter. T and R, meanwhile, are the two most common consonants overall in the game.

So there you have it — for the Tom’s Guide team at least, the best Wordle start word is STARE.

Though, a pair of MIT researchers(opens in new tab) have their own pick: SALET (a light medieval helmet). That also gives you five of the top 10 letters, but we’re not as keen on it as STARE — as R is the third-most-used letter, and L is the sixth-most-used. A good alternate for sure.

The best Wordle start word according to WordleBot

The NYT’s excellent WordleBot tool has its own list of the best Wordle start words — and it should know, given it’s made by the people who now run Wordle.

The math behind it is based on how many of Wordle’s 2,309 solutions are left, on average, after you play it, plus the average number of steps needed to solve it and a couple of other metrics. And by that measure, the best Wordle start word is apparently CRANE.

That’s surprising to me — not least because STARE actually fares better in terms of average number of solutions, scoring 71.8 to CRANE’s 78.7. But overall WordleBot awards CRANE a score of 99/100 and STARE only 97, and presumably it’s better at math than I am, it being a computer and all that.

Here are WordleBot’s 10 best Wordle start words: