If, on the other hand, you're simply trying to win within the allotted six guesses, the top three words to play are "adept," "clamp" and "plaid." Using any of these three words will yield an average success rate in winning the game of 98.79%, 98.75%, and 98.75%, respectively, if you're playing the optimal strategy.
In Wordle, an optimal strategy means avoiding repeating letters as much as possible. Instead of rushing to try to guess the actual solution on your second try, an ideal second word would repeat no letters from your first guess.
A pair of MIT researchers recently set out to find the optimal starting word for the popular online puzzle, discovering that the statistically superior first guess is SALET, which is a 15th century helmet.
According to the New York Times, the most popular starting words are “adieu” or “audio.” Because both words consist of many vowels, they quickly make clear what letters are in the solution word.
The Strategy Behind the Best Wordle Starting Words
Wordle experts recommend choosing vowel-heavy words as your opening guess word for Wordle. The reason for this is simple: there are only five vowels in the English alphabet, and most words contain one or more of them.
A letter that isn't in the word in any spot shows up gray. With each “burner” word, you can learn hints about the letter and their placements, and then, you get one chance to guess the Wordle. This simple yet entertaining game became extremely viral within the first two months of 2022.
One of the best ways to beat Wordle is to have a sheet of paper handy while you play. Draw 5 blank lines on the paper (one for each letter), and enter any letters you've already guessed correctly. Write down different words that have those letters to experiment on paper before inputting your guesses into Wordle.
The 2nd most popular first letter is "C" which comes in at about 10%. Not super-surprising, but interesting.
The odds get marginally better every subsequent game (e.g., 1 in 2,314; 1 in 2,313) assuming the correct answer isn't a repeat of the previous days' solutions. With that in mind, it's highly unlikely that 1% of all players are guessing correctly on the first try — and much more likely that some folks are cheating.
One great option for a starting word with three vowels is IRATE. That's because R and T are both very common consonants in the English language, and the A and E are in positions where they frequently appear in Wordle answers.
The least common letters in all words are the usual suspects: J, Q, Z, X, and it's unlikely any five-letter Wordle word would contain any of those characters. F, V, and K are also uncommon, but these letters have higher odds of being in one of the five possible Wordle positions.
Research has revealed that “Parer” has been the hardest word to guess in the NYTimes game Wordle. A study conducted by online gaming site im-a-puzzle.com utilised and examined data collected by a Twitter API called WordleStats that has been analysing players' Wordle tweets since the start of 2022.
Sometimes it seems pretty easy and others not so much. Here are the 5 "Magic" Words that will help you solve Wordle more often than not. "Derby, flank, ghost, winch, jumps."
Over 15% of Wordle's words of the day start with S. Only six other starting letters appear in more than 5% of Wordle words. In order of frequency, they are C, B, T, P, A, and F. These starting letters might seem pretty surprising, but they are close to the order of general five-letter words.
If you can consistently get Wordle in three guesses, you are pretty darn good. A score of three is solidly above average, and it is certainly nothing to frown at. Especially with harder words such as “cynic,” “vivid,” or “swill,” getting it in three is very good. Three takes skill, finesse, and intellect.
If this is indeed the pattern that Wordle returns, then you have a 1/246 chance of picking the correct target on the second try (e.g. by choosing the word shown in Figure 1 for that pattern).
Wordle's dictionary contains 2315 possible answers, so each possible colour combination from your first guess contributes a 1/2315 probability of getting the Wordle within two.
This means the top most commonly used letters in 5-letter words (in terms of total frequency as well as average frequency) were the letters A, E, S, O, R, I, L, T, etc.