Data study · June 22, 2026
The Best Wordle Starting Words, by the Numbers
We analyzed 6,496 common five-letter wordsto find which openers reveal the most. The internet's favourite vowel-pile, ADIEU, ranks just 1,168th. Here's what the data says to play instead.
Key findings
- • E, S and A are the most common letters in five-letter words — together nearly 30% of all letters.
- • The strongest openers by letter coverage are AROSE and RAISE, which capture the five most frequent letters in one guess.
- • ADIEU (1,168th) and AUDIO (2,329th) underperform: stacking vowels wastes guesses on letters that rarely decide the answer.
- • The best opener uses two vowels, not four — paired with high-value consonants R, S, T, L and N.
How common is each letter?
Share of all letters across the 6,496-word corpus. A great opener loads up on the bars at the top.
The best openers by letter coverage
Every five-letter word with all-distinct letters, scored by the combined frequency of its letters. The leaders are anagrams of the same powerhouse set — A, E, O/I, R, S:
Popular openers, ranked
How the words players actually type stack up (rank out of 4,265 distinct-letter common words):
| Word | Rank | Why |
|---|---|---|
| AROSEgreat | 1st | Covers the five most common letters at once. |
| RAISEgreat | 2nd | The crowd-favorite that the data actually backs. |
| SLATEgreat | 29th | Pairs frequent vowels with S, L and T. |
| STAREgreat | 16th | Strong all-rounder; tests R, S and T. |
| CRANEsolid | 742nd | A strong consonant-led pick favoured by Wordle theory; ranks lower here only because our metric rewards S. |
| ADIEUweak | 1,168th | Four vowels burn a guess testing letters that rarely decide a Wordle. |
| AUDIOweak | 2,329th | U and a second mid-word vowel are low-information; no R/S/T/L/N at all. |
The most common letter in each position
Where letters tend to land in five-letter words:
Stuck mid-puzzle?
Once you've played your opener, drop your green, yellow and grey letters into our Wordle Solver to see every remaining answer.
Methodology
We started from the ENABLE word list and kept the 6,496 most common five-letter words (those with a known usage-frequency ranking), a close proxy for the kinds of everyday words Wordle uses as answers. We counted how often each letter A–Z appears across that corpus, both overall and by position. We then scored every five-letter word with five distinct letters (4,265 of them) by the summed frequency of its letters — a simple measure of how much common-letter ground a single guess covers.
Limitations. This metric rewards letter coverage, not full information-theoretic optimisation, so established consonant-led picks like CRANE and SALET rank a little lower here than in entropy-based studies. Our corpus also includes plurals, which inflates the letter S (note the 29% S in the fifth position) even though Wordle answers are rarely plural. The headline finding — that vowel-stacking openers underperform balanced two-vowel words — holds regardless.
Analysis by UnscramblePro, June 22, 2026.
Cite this study
Journalists and bloggers are welcome to use these findings with attribution and a link to this page:
UnscramblePro, “The Best Wordle Starting Words, by the Numbers” (https://unscramblepro.com/best-wordle-starting-words)
Want a custom cut of the data (by length, letter, or game dictionary)? Get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the single best Wordle starting word?
- By raw letter coverage in common five-letter words, AROSE and RAISE top the list — they pack the five most frequent letters (E, S, A, O, R / I) into one guess. SLATE, STARE and CRANE are also excellent. There is no universally 'correct' opener, but any of these tests far more useful letters than a vowel-heavy word like ADIEU.
- Why is ADIEU a bad Wordle starter?
- ADIEU is popular because it holds four vowels, but that's the problem: vowels like U and a second mid-word vowel rarely determine a Wordle answer, and ADIEU includes none of the high-value consonants R, S, T, L or N. In our analysis it ranks 1,168th out of 4,265 distinct-letter common words.
- Should my opener have lots of vowels?
- No. One or two well-placed vowels (A, E, O) plus common consonants (R, S, T, L, N) gives more information than stacking three or four vowels. AROSE and SLATE each use only two vowels and outperform AUDIO and ADIEU.
- How was this study done?
- We measured how often each letter appears across 6,496 common five-letter English words, then scored every five-letter word with all-distinct letters by the combined frequency of its letters. See the Methodology section for the full method and its limitations.