Wordle HintsAsk ten Wordle players for the best opening word and you will get SLATE, CRANE, ADIEU, AUDIO, and a couple of personal favourites defended on pure instinct. The interesting thing is that this is not a matter of taste. The strength of an opener is a measurable quantity, and once you see how it is measured, the usual winners stop looking like opinions and start looking like answers.
This piece walks through the actual math, in plain language: letter frequency, letter position, and the information-theory idea that ties them together. No equations required, just the logic.
Start with letter frequency
The official answer list contains 2,309 words. Count how often each letter appears across all of them and a clear ranking falls out. E is the most common letter, followed by A, R, O, and T, with S, L, and N close behind. J, Q, X, and Z bring up the rear, appearing in only a handful of answers each. We break this down fully in the most common letters in Wordle.
A good opener simply puts as many top-ranked letters on the board as possible. SLATE uses S, L, A, T, and E — four of the eight most frequent letters plus the most common letter of all. That is why it tests so much of the answer space in a single move: more than half of all answers contain at least one letter from SLATE in some position.
Frequency alone is not enough — position matters
Here is the subtlety most quick takes miss. Knowing a letter is in the word is worth far less than knowing it is in a specific spot. So the better measure weights each letter by how often it appears in each of the five positions, not just overall.
This is why SLATE edges out anagrams like LEAST, STALE, or TALES even though they use identical letters. SLATE places its letters where those letters most often actually land: S is a strong opener position, A sits comfortably in the middle, and a trailing E is the single most common final letter in the whole list. Same letters, better fit, more green tiles on average.
Why duplicate letters are a tax
Every repeated letter in an opener wastes a slot. A word like MUMMY spends three of its five tiles on a single letter, M, which tells you about only one letter's worth of the answer. The best openers are all five distinct letters for exactly this reason: five tiles, five independent questions about the answer.
The idea that ties it together: information
The cleanest way to score an opener is to ask how much it shrinks the field of possible answers, on average, across all 2,309 puzzles. Mathematicians call this expected information, but you can picture it concretely. Before any guess, 2,309 words are in play. A great opener splits that pile into many small groups based on the colour pattern it returns, so that whatever the answer is, you are left with a short list.
A weak opener does the opposite: it leaves you in a big group no matter what. By this measure, the top tier is consistently SLATE, CRANE, CRATE, TRACE, and SLANT. Each one reduces the average remaining field to somewhere around sixty words after one guess. A random five-letter word often leaves several hundred. That gap is the entire advantage, and it compounds over the next two turns. For the practical ranking, see the best Wordle starting words.
What about vowel-heavy openers?
ADIEU and AUDIO are popular on the theory that nailing the vowels first simplifies everything after. The math is lukewarm on this. These words confirm which vowels are present, but they spend four or five tiles doing it and leave nearly all the consonant work for later. Since consonants do most of the heavy lifting in distinguishing answers, a balanced word like SLATE — which tests strong consonants and common vowels at once — extracts more information per guess. Vowel openers are not bad, they are just not optimal.
The two-word opener: stacking the coverage
If your first word comes back blank, the math says your second word should cover five fresh high-frequency letters. SLATE followed by CHORD tests ten of the most common letters across two guesses — a deliberately planned pair that front-loads almost all the useful information before you make a single real decision. The combined coverage, not either word alone, is what wins. The complete guide to solving any Wordle covers how to deploy this in practice.
The honest caveat
Here is the part the leaderboards downplay: the gap between the very best opener and a merely good one is small, often a fraction of a guess in the long run. SLATE versus CRANE will not decide your streak. What decides it is everything after the opener — reading the tiles correctly, respecting duplicate-letter logic, and narrowing instead of guessing. Pick one strong opener from the top tier, stop agonising over it, and put your energy into the midgame.
Put the numbers to work
The math gives you the opener; the rest is execution. When you have your first clues and want to see exactly how far the field has shrunk, drop them into the free Wordle solver, which filters the answer list against your tiles and shows what remains. To explore the raw material, browse the five-letter word lists by first or last letter and see the frequency patterns for yourself.