What are the Best Wordle Start Words?

Wordle have a daily streak and choosing an effective starting word is important for maximising your chances of solving the puzzle every day. It will help you win the game to start it with the best Wordle start word, combined with the daily hints and your experience.

Here is a list of the best Wordle starting words:

• CRANE
• SLATE
• RAISE
• STARE
• SALET

Let’s dive into why these words made it to the list of the best start words.

Why the Start Word Matters?

Starting the puzzle with the best word helps you guess the correct answer in fewer attempts. It increases the chance of keeping your daily Wordle streak. Fewer attempts mean you are better at solving the game. For example, guessing the correct answer in 4 attempts is better than doing it in 5 or 6 attempts.

The first guess in Wordle provides the following critical feedback:

1. It identifies frequently occurring vowels (A, E, I, O, U).
2. It covers common consonants (R, T, N, S, L).
3. It avoids repeating letters, ensuring maximum letter coverage in a single guess.

Choosing a vowel-rich first word gives valuable information about the answer. The positions of letters may not be correct, but knowing that the letters are present in the answer is important. Various sources have tried to find the best start words for Wordle. This is either based upon statistics or the personal experiences of the long-term Wordlers (Wordle players).

Example: Some statistical models (by MIT Sloan, Jonathan Olson of Colorado etc.) suggest that SALET is the best candidate. But the Wordlebot mostly uses CRANE as the starting word. This means that Wordlebot tries to place the most letters in the right place, although SALET gives you the chance of giving you more letters in general. Wordle’s answers do not include obscure words and previous solutions. Hence, CRANE is practically better than SALET for starting Wordle.

The knowledge of the best start words combined with the daily Wordle Hints will give you a boost in NYT Wordle scores. But, we have to look at the letter frequencies in order to get to the best start words.

Most Common Letters for the Best Start Words

It is a good idea to use the letters that occur more frequently in English. Ideal word candidates for Wordle solution contain letters which are generally frequent in English words. Some letters appear more frequently than others. For example, “A” appears more often than the letter “X” across many 5-letter common words. About, Alert, Chase, Brown, and Dance are more common words than Xenic, Zibet, and Waddy etc.

Based on our (wordlehints.co.uk) analysis of public data, the most common letters for the Wordle words are:

• Most frequent letters overall: E, A, R, O, T.
• Most frequent consonants: R, T, N, S, L.
• Most frequent vowels: E, A, O.
• Least frequent letters: Q, Z, X, J.

This makes words that combine these frequent letters highly effective. For instance, “STARE” includes S, T, A, R, and E, covering multiple high-frequency letters.

Interestingly, the most common letters overlap with the Etaoin Shrdlu idea. E, T, A, O (4 of the 6 Etaoin letters) are the most popular according to our study.

Let’s see why we came to this conclusion. We have to look into the letter frequencies of common English letters as well as the words which are the possible Wordle answers.

Letter Frequencies in English Words

Researchers have analysed letter frequencies in common English words. It concluded that the following letters are the most common (regardless if they are possible Wordle answers)

• E
• T
• A
• I
• O

Notable of these researches are:

• Samuel Morse (Morse Code Inventor)
• Cryptographical Mathematics, by Robert Edward Lewand
• Department of Mathematics, Cornell University

Letter Frequencies by Samuel Morse

The frequency of the letters is more important than the frequency of the words in word games. A statistical analysis of the most common words for the 9th edition of the Oxford Dictionary was done by Samuel Morse (1791-1872). According to his analysis:

The proportions’ column shows the proportion of the least occurring letter between other letters. That means “E” is 56 times more common than “Q” and “A” is over 43 times more frequent than “Q” and so on. According to this data, the most common occurring letters are E, A, R, I and O.

Words’ Letter frequencies by Cryptographical Mathematics

The relative frequencies of letters in general English plain text was analysed by Robert Edward Lewand of Cryptographical Mathematics.

Based on this study, the most common letters are E, T, A, I and N.

Letter frequencies according to Cornell University

Math Explorer’s Project at Cornell University did an analysis of English letter frequency based on a sample of 40,000 words. Here’s a graph for insights:

This analysis concludes that E, T, A, O and I are the top occurring letters.

Letter Frequencies in Wordle Solutions

Study of letters in general English words is not enough to conclude which words will best work with Wordle. Therefore, possible Wordle-only solutions’ words analysis is important. The most common letters in these words are:

• E
• A
• R
• O

This is based on the research of the following three sources.

Wordle Letter occurrences by Dr. Drang

Dr. Drang (pseudonym), a Ph.D. in Engineering, tried to find Wordle’s common letters. Though he used the words all the possible answers plus the words which are possible guesses (but not the answers). He concluded that the most common letters are: S, E, A, R, O.

Wordle Letter occurrences by Josh Bernoff

Josh Bernoff used a better approach and did the mathematical analysis of only the possible Wordle solutions. He concluded that the letters E, A, R, O, T are the most common. In addition to that, the frequency of letters on each position was also analysed. The top 2 letters for each position are listed below:

This gives us the insight into why SALET and CRANE are widely used first words.

Wordle Letter occurrences by Tomsguide

E is the most common letter in both English and Wordle answers according to Tomsguide. They also did a similar analysis of positions of frequent letters, and it is exactly the same as in Table 2 by Josh Bernoff. But, it included the ranked total occurrence of letters, which are: E, A, R, O, T. Which again exactly coincides with the research of Josh Bernoff.

Vowels vs Consonants

Vowels are common in Wordle words, but they’re not quite as common as consonants. The vowel to Consonant ratio is 35% to 65% (1 : 1.857). This means that you will encounter 1.857 consonants for every vowel in Wordle words.

It is helpful to know where these letters are common – in what positions? The Table below tells us that vowels are more common in second and third place (position 2 and 3) as compared to the start and end of the word.

The higher the number, the higher the occurrence of the letter relative to the least present letter. It will be helpful to know which vowels are present in these locations.

WordleBot’s favourite starting words

The top Wordlebot’s favourite is CRANE as of January 2025. Some of its previous favourite starting words are:

• SLATE
• TRACE
• CRATE
• LEAST
• STALE

Best Starting Words Overall

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The best Wordle start words, such as “CRANE,” “SLATE,” and “RAISE,” are grounded in statistical analysis and expert recommendations. A few notable mentions by the respective sources are included in the following table:

These best Wordle start words will help you guess your daily Wordle within six attempts.