Best Wordle Starting Words
Ranked by elimination power across every Wordle answer ever played.
A great opening word in Wordle does one thing: it tests as many likely letters as possible in a single guess. Using our full list of 2,325 official Wordle answers, we scored every five-letter word with five unique letters by how many of the most common answer letters it covers.
The 5 Most Common Letters in Wordle Answers
A great opener uses as many of these as possible.
Top 12 Starting Words by Elimination Score
Each of these words has 5 unique letters and tests 4–5 of the most common Wordle letters in a single guess.
Score: 4133
Score: 4131
Score: 4131
Score: 4131
Score: 4112
Score: 4107
Score: 3928
Score: 3928
Score: 3928
Score: 3928
Score: 3899
Score: 3871
How the score is calculated
Each word's score is the sum of how many answers each of its unique letters appears in. A word like irate covers 4133 appearances across all answers — meaning a single guess gives you information about more than half the answer space.
We exclude words with repeat letters because a repeat tile gives no additional information when you're trying to discover new letters.
Try one of these openers now
Pick a word above, plug it into the solver, and see how it narrows today's puzzle.