IRATE is the top-ranked Wordle opener in a disclosed analysis that tested guesses against 1,810 tracked past answers. RAISE and ARISE follow closely. This is a ranking by expected candidates left—not an official New York Times recommendation or a promise about future puzzles—and the best choice depends on what you want your first guess to do.
What are the 25 best Wordle starting words?
NYT Game Solver, an independent fan resource, ranks these words by the expected number of possible answers remaining after the color feedback from a guess. Its test uses 1,810 tracked past Wordle answers. A lower number means the guess tends to leave fewer candidates.
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| Rank | Starting word | Expected candidates left |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | IRATE | about 47.6 |
| 2 | RAISE | about 48.4 |
| 3 | ARISE | about 50.2 |
| 4 | CRATE | about 53.0 |
| 5 | TRACE | about 53.4 |
| 6 | ALTER | about 53.6 |
| 7 | ALERT | about 53.9 |
| 8 | SNARE | about 54.0 |
| 9 | LATER | about 54.1 |
| 10 | STARE | about 54.5 |
| 11 | SLATE | about 54.9 |
| 12 | ATONE | about 56.4 |
| 13 | LEARN | about 56.9 |
| 14 | ALONE | about 57.1 |
| 15 | LASER | about 57.4 |
| 16 | CRANE | about 57.6 |
| 17 | STALE | about 57.6 |
| 18 | REACT | about 59.0 |
| 19 | TRAIL | about 59.1 |
| 20 | TRADE | about 59.3 |
| 21 | LEAST | about 60.1 |
| 22 | AISLE | about 60.2 |
| 23 | STORE | about 61.0 |
| 24 | CATER | about 61.6 |
| 25 | SCARE | about 61.6 |
The figures are the site’s calculations, not statistics published by The New York Times. Its page also reports that a typical word leaves about 165.7 candidates on average. The method groups possible answers by their feedback patterns and calculates an expected remaining-candidate count from the sizes of those groups; it also reports expected information in bits, for which a higher score is better. See NYT Game Solver’s analysis and methodology.
How should you choose your first guess?
If your goal is to test several useful letters immediately, start with one of the top five: IRATE, RAISE, ARISE, CRATE or TRACE. Each has five distinct letters, so one guess checks five different letters. After that, let the green and yellow tiles guide your next choice rather than playing a fixed second word automatically.
#1 Best Overall
A useful personal rule is to balance four considerations:
- Expected narrowing: The ranking above favors guesses that tend to split the tested answer pool into smaller groups.
- Answer eligibility: A word can be a useful probe without being a possible solution itself. Analyses using guess lists and answer lists may therefore rank words differently.
- Letter coverage: Some players prioritize vowels; others want common consonants as well as vowels.
- Consistency and recall: A familiar opener is easy to play repeatedly, and a consistent choice makes it easier to learn how its feedback patterns work.
There is no evidence here that one opener is best for every player or every future answer. The fan resource explicitly says it is not affiliated with or endorsed by The New York Times.
Rank #2
Why do Wordle starting-word rankings differ?
Analyses use different answer pools
The 1,810-answer set used for the ranking is a tracked historical corpus, not a guarantee of the current New York Times answer list. Other analyses use different historical or curated lists, so the same opener can produce a different result. Tom’s Guide, for example, summarizes one analysis built around 2,309 valid solutions and 12,972 possible guesses; those numbers describe that analysis, not necessarily the live game lists. Tom’s Guide discusses the differences between candidate words and possible answers.
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Expected candidates left, expected information gained and expected turns to solve are related but distinct objectives. A word that performs well on one measure need not top another. Some strong probe words may also be excluded from the possible-answer pool, which means they cannot solve the puzzle on the first guess.
WordleBot recommendations are snapshots, not permanent rules
The New York Times reported in 2022 that WordleBot had changed its preferred opener from CRANE to SLATE. Matthew Conlen, a graphics editor who worked on WordleBot, said of those two options, “I think either makes for a great starting word,” adding, “The difference between best and second-best is tiny.” Those comments belong to the September 1, 2022 report, not a claim about the bot’s current recommendation. Read the New York Times report on WordleBot and player choices.
Players do not all value the same letters
ADIEU is a familiar vowel-heavy choice, but more vowels are not automatically better than a mix of vowels and common consonants. In the New York Times’ historical user-data window from June 15 to August 22, 2022, ADIEU was used by an average of 5 percent of users each day. Among players with more than 10 games in that window, 28 percent used the same first word at least 90 percent of the time. Those figures describe that period, not current player behavior.
Rank #4
How do Wordle colors affect your next guess?
Wordle gives you six guesses to find a five-letter target. Green means the letter is correct and in the correct position; yellow means the letter is in the answer but belongs in another position. A gray tile means the letter is absent or, when a guess repeats a letter, that the answer has fewer copies than the guess does.
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