The best starting words, and why they work
A guide to opening theory · Last updated 6 August 2026
Almost every player has a favourite opening word, and almost nobody can say why it is good. The honest answer is that a handful of openers are meaningfully better than average, a great many are roughly equivalent, and one very popular choice is considerably worse than its reputation suggests.
What an opening word is actually for
Your first guess cannot be an informed attempt at the answer, because you have no information yet. Its only job is to divide the space of possible answers as evenly as possible.
That framing matters, because it is not the same as "use the most common letters". A guess that returns all grey squares is not a wasted guess — it has eliminated every word containing those five letters, which may be a large fraction of the candidates. What you want to avoid is a guess whose result is predictable, because a predictable result teaches you nothing.
The useful mental model: a good opener is one where you genuinely cannot guess what the colours will be. If you can be fairly confident in advance that a letter will come back grey, that letter is doing little work.
Letter frequency, and its limits
Across common five-letter English words, the letters appear at roughly this order of frequency:
| Tier | Letters | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Very high | E, A, R, O, T | Any strong opener should contain two or three of these. |
| High | L, I, S, N, C | Excellent supporting letters, especially S and L. |
| Moderate | U, H, D, P, M, G, Y | Worth including, but rarely worth building an opener around. |
| Low | B, F, W, K, V | Acceptable in a second guess, weak in a first. |
| Very low | X, Z, J, Q | Never worth an opening slot. |
This table explains a lot, but it is incomplete in an important way: position matters as much as presence. A letter placed where it commonly occurs is more likely to return a green square, and greens are worth more than yellows because they resolve position as well as membership.
Some positional tendencies in five-letter words are strong. S is overwhelmingly the most common opening letter. E is the most common final letter, followed by Y, T and R. Vowels cluster in the second and third positions. An opener that respects these tendencies extracts more than one that ignores them.
Why ADIEU is overrated
ADIEU is probably the most recommended opener in casual discussion, on the reasoning that it contains four vowels. It is not a disaster, but it underperforms, and the reason is instructive.
- It spends slots on weak vowels. U is the least common vowel by a wide margin, and I is well behind E and A. Two of the five slots are doing very little.
- It contains only one consonant. D is mid-tier. The opener therefore tells you almost nothing about R, S, T, L, N — the consonants that most often decide a puzzle.
- Vowels are less discriminating than they feel. Nearly every answer contains at least one vowel, so learning "there is an A somewhere" narrows the field less than learning "there is no R, S or T".
The same critique applies to AUDIO, which is even more lopsided. Finding the vowels feels productive because it is visible progress, but you will often reach guess three knowing every vowel and still facing a dozen candidates because the consonants are untouched.
Openers that hold up
These consistently perform near the top in analyses of the standard answer list:
| Word | Why it works |
|---|---|
| SLATE | Three top-tier letters plus S and L, with E in its most common final position. A perennial favourite. |
| CRANE | Very strong consonant coverage; R and N are placed where they frequently sit. |
| TRACE | Effectively CRANE's equal, trading N for T. |
| CRATE | Same letters as TRACE in a different arrangement, which shifts which greens you are likely to see. |
| SALET | Under one widely cited information-theory analysis this is the single strongest opener — though it is an obscure word, and the margin over SLATE is small. |
| RAISE | Strong, and pairs two high-value vowels with three high-value consonants. |
| STARE | Slightly behind the leaders but comfortably above average. |
Notice what they share: two vowels rather than four, at least three high-frequency consonants, no repeated letters, and letters sitting in plausible positions.
Never repeat a letter in your opener
An opener like EERIE or LEVEL is self-sabotaging. You have five slots and each repeated letter throws one away. A repeated letter can only confirm information the first instance already gave you. Save duplicate-letter guesses for the endgame, where you may genuinely need to test whether a word has one L or two.
Should you use the same opener every day?
Yes — with one qualification.
Using a fixed opener means you become fluent at reading its results. After a few weeks you will recognise the shapes: you will know immediately which words fit "green T in position four, yellow A" without laboriously working through the alphabet. That pattern recognition is worth more than the tiny theoretical difference between the top openers.
The qualification is that a fixed opener makes the game slightly repetitive, and some players find rotating between two or three keeps it interesting. That is a perfectly reasonable trade — the difference in expected score is small.
The two-word opening
A stronger approach for many players is to fix your first two guesses in advance, choosing a pair that covers ten distinct high-value letters between them. You play the second word regardless of what the first returns.
- CRANE then SILTY
- SLATE then CHORD
- TRACE then MOULD
You give up the chance of a lucky guess-two solve, and in exchange you arrive at guess three with an unusually complete picture. In practice this trades a small number of two-guess wins for a large reduction in five- and six-guess grinds, which is usually a good deal — and it is much easier to play well, because guess two requires no thought.
Important: the two-word opening does not work in hard mode, where you are required to reuse revealed hints. See the hard mode guide for openers suited to that ruleset.
How much does any of this matter?
Less than the internet suggests. The gap between an excellent opener and a merely decent one is a fraction of a guess per game on average. The gap between a good opener and a bad one — say CRANE against FUZZY — is substantial, but few people are choosing openers that bad.
If you want to improve your average score, the opener is the smallest available gain. What actually costs players games is poor decisions in the middle of the puzzle and walking into trap word families at the end. Pick a sound opener from the table above, stop thinking about it, and spend your attention on guesses three and four.