Complete Wordle Strategy
A practical framework for solving Wordle in 3–4 guesses, every time.
1. The opening word
Your first guess should test five distinct letters drawn from the most common letters in Wordle answers. Words like SLATE, CRANE, and STARE consistently rank highly. The exact pick matters less than picking any word with five unique high-frequency letters.
See our data-driven ranking for the top 12 openers.
2. Vowel mapping
Five-letter English words almost always contain at least one vowel, and most contain two. After your first guess, your priority is identifying which vowels are in the answer. If your opener tested A and E and both came back grey, your second guess should aim at I, O, and U.
3. The elimination guess
When your candidate list shrinks below ~30 but is still ambiguous, don't rush. Spend a guess testing the most common unknown letters across remaining candidates — even if that guess can't be the answer. This is called a "throwaway" or "scout" guess and is the single biggest source of leverage when you're stuck.
4. Consonant clusters
English five-letter words feature a small set of recurring consonant pairs: TH, ST, CH, SH, BR, PR, TR, GR, CL, FL, PL, SL, and SP. When you've locked two consonants into adjacent positions, one of these is usually the answer. The same applies to common endings: -IGHT, -OUND, -OUSE, -ATER.
5. Hard mode tactics
Hard Mode forces you to use confirmed letters in subsequent guesses. This eliminates the elimination guess as a tactic, which means opener selection matters even more. In Hard Mode, prefer openers that produce positional information — a green tile is more valuable than a yellow one when you can't pivot.
6. Recovery
Sometimes two guesses come back fully grey. When that happens, stop trying to refine — restart your information-gathering. Pick a guess testing five new letters, ideally including the vowels you haven't tested yet. A 0-information opening followed by a 5-letter scout guess still leaves you 4 attempts.
Use the solver
Plug your guesses into the solver and it will rank suggested next moves automatically — including throwaway guesses that test the most informative unknown letters.