If you’ve made it this far, I’ll assume you already know what WORDLE is and how to play. If you need to do a little catching up, hop over to the Wiki, then meet me back here. For some additional background, you can check out this article from the New York Times.
Bottom Line Up Front
The following analysis was performed on the actual WORDLE solutions dataset (2,309 words), and does not consider the complete WORDLE dictionary at large (12,947 words). These recommended starting words give you the best opportunity of scoring green and yellow tiles on your first guess, using a word that could actually be the solution.
Best Overall Starting Word
AROSE
The best words to open your game of WORDLE with are ‘arose‘, ‘slate‘, or ‘teary‘. These words give you your best chance of scoring the coveted green tiles without needlessly sacrificing the opportunity of scoring yellows.
| Words | Score |
|---|---|
| arose | 148.701844 |
| slate | 148.101941 |
| teary | 147.951435 |
| stare | 147.867534 |
| crate | 147.847753 |
| trace | 146.692172 |
| raise | 146.114680 |
| arise | 145.977557 |
| stale | 145.911181 |
| store | 145.904106 |
| … | … |
| alert | 143.265872 |
| alter | 141.830978 |
| later | 142.894149 |
Best Odds of Scoring Yellow
ALERT
If your preferred strategy is to acquire as many yellow tiles as possible, your best opening words are ‘alert‘, ‘alter‘, or ‘later‘. Note these words are using the same 5 letters in different positions, so falling back to the table above (which takes letter position into account), the recommended starting word for this strategy would be ‘alert‘.
| Words | Score |
|---|---|
| alert | 118 |
| alter | 118 |
| later | 118 |
| arose | 117 |
| irate | 117 |
| stare | 116 |
| arise | 114 |
| atone | 114 |
| cater | 114 |
| crate | 114 |
Best Odds of Scoring a Green
SASSY
Finally, if your strategy is to throw caution to the wind and favor scoring a green tile on your first guess at the expense of maximizing yellows (or individual grays), your best starting words are ‘sassy‘, ‘sissy‘, or ‘sooty‘, in decreasing order of efficacy.
| Words | Score |
|---|---|
| sassy | 53.720203 |
| sissy | 51.552580 |
| sooty | 46.390522 |
| booby | 43.711044 |
| salsa | 42.834590 |
| sorry | 42.761030 |
| saucy | 42.367328 |
| soapy | 42.122354 |
| shiny | 41.623038 |
| booty | 41.307267 |
Questions?…
Keep reading below for in-depth explanation of how I got these results.
Methods
If you’re interested in repeating this analysis, or running some different statistics of your own checkout my Github Gist or follow along below.
Check My Work
The Dataset
Work with the data yourself here!
