Every Wordle opener is a small bet on which letters are most likely to show up. Instead of trusting a hunch (or a friend who swears by the same word every morning), we went to the source: the 8,619 five-letter words in the word list behind the JumbleFix solver, and counted where every letter lands.
The short version
- S starts 12.2% of all five-letter words and ends 31.2% of them, but most of those endings are plurals, which Wordle answers almost never are.
- Leave out the words that end in S and E is the most common letter: it appears in 48.3% of the remaining 5,932 words, ahead of A (41.8%) and R (33.8%).
- The openers that cover the most common letters are ARIEL, ORATE, IRATE, AROSE, ARISE and RAISE.
- 36 five-letter words contain no A, E, I, O or U at all, and two of them do not even have a Y.
Where each letter likes to sit
Because Wordle rarely uses plurals, the counts below use the 5,932 five-letter words that do not end in S. Each line shows the four most common letters for that slot and the share of words that have it there.
- First letter: S (13.1%), C (8.1%), B (6.8%), A (6.4%)
- Second letter: A (16.2%), O (14.5%), E (11.9%), I (10.5%)
- Third letter: A (9.6%), I (9.0%), R (8.5%), O (8.0%)
- Fourth letter: E (19.6%), A (8.2%), I (8.2%), N (6.1%)
- Fifth letter: E (15.7%), Y (15.2%), D (9.8%), R (8.8%)
Two slots stand out. The second letter is a vowel in 61.7% of these words, so a yellow vowel from your first guess very often belongs in slot two. And the fourth slot belongs to E: nearly one word in five has an E right there, as in BAKED, CAMEL or TOWER. If you have an E that is yellow somewhere else, try it in slot four before you try anything fancy.
The ends are less predictable. E and Y split the last slot almost evenly, which is a good reminder that Y is a working vowel at the end of a word (CAGEY, DIZZY, PARTY) even when it never shows up early.
The S trap
Across all 8,619 five-letter words, S is the most common first letter and, by a mile, the most common last letter: 31.2% of the words end in it. Almost all of those are plurals and verb forms like CARES, BOATS and RUNES.
Wordle draws its answers from a much smaller list of everyday words and skips almost every plural. So a list that counts every valid word will tell you to open with an S-ending word, and the daily puzzle will politely ignore you. That is why everything else in this article sets the S-enders aside. Put another way: S is a great letter to play, and a poor letter to bet on at the end of the answer.
Two ways to score an opener
There are two honest ways to rank a first guess, and they give different winners.
Coverage counts how many words contain each letter anywhere, then adds up the five letters of the guess (no repeats). A high score means the guess is likely to light up yellows. On the no-S list, the leaders are:
- ARIEL (a valid word for a kind of gazelle)
- OATER and ORATE, tied
- IRATE, RETIA and TERAI, tied
- AROSE
- ARISE, RAISE and SERAI, tied
Position gives points only when a letter sits in a slot where it is common. A high score means the guess is likely to land greens. The leaders read almost like a recipe, S first, A or O second, E fourth:
- SANED
- SANER
- SATED
- CONEY
- SOLED
Which should you use? Coverage tells you which letters are in the answer; position tells you where. Most players get more out of coverage on guess one and position on guess two, once they know a few letters. Being IRATE on your first guess is fine, as long as you are irate in a useful direction.
Even the best opener misses
No single word covers everything. ARIEL, the top coverage opener, shares no letter at all with 408 of the 5,932 no-S words: words like BONGO, BOOTH and BOOST. That is about one game in fifteen where your opener comes back all grey.
The fix is a second guess built from the letters the first one skipped. After an all-grey ARIEL, SNOUT shares at least one letter with 407 of those 408 words, and DONUT with 405. All grey on guess one is not bad luck. It is information that cost you one row.
Words with no ordinary vowels
36 five-letter words contain none of A, E, I, O and U. Most lean on Y: CRYPT, GLYPH, LYMPH, NYMPH, PSYCH, MYRRH, SYLPH and TRYST are all in the list. Two do not even use a Y. CRWTH is an old Welsh stringed instrument (the W does the vowel's job), and PHPHT is an exclamation of mild annoyance, which is also the sound most players make when they meet it.
If your greys have eaten every vowel, try a Y before you try your luck.
Two more patterns worth knowing
- Doubles are common. 34.3% of five-letter words repeat a letter, like BOBBY, DIZZY and EERIE. Do not rule out a letter just because you already found it once.
- One vowel is normal. 31.2% of five-letter words contain exactly one of A, E, I, O and U. If you have found one vowel and the rest are grey, the answer may simply not have another.
Putting it to work
- Open with a coverage word such as ORATE, IRATE or ARISE.
- If it comes back mostly grey, follow with a word built from letters you have not tried, such as SNOUT or DONUT.
- Put a yellow vowel in slot two and a yellow E in slot four before you try other spots.
- Keep Y in mind for the last slot and for vowel-starved boards.
When you have a few greens and yellows and want to see what is left, the Wordle helper takes green letters by slot, yellows as Must Include and greys as Exclude. For browsing by length, the 5 letter word finder lists everything that fits your letters.
How we counted
We started from the ENABLE word list, a public-domain list used by many word games (172,823 words), and kept the 155,980 words that are also active on JumbleFix. Of those, 8,619 have five letters, and 5,932 of them do not end in S. Each word counts once. Wordle's own answer list is smaller and hand-picked, so percentages for it will differ, but the patterns above (E in slot four, vowels in slot two, the S trap) hold up well.
This article was written with the help of an AI model. Every count and ranking in it comes from queries against the JumbleFix word list.