Wordle strategy: what 8,610 five-letter words say about your opening guess

By Louisa Lowe, Editor — Words & Word Games · Published 30 July 2026

Wordle gives you six guesses at a five-letter word. Rather than repeat the usual advice, I asked our own dictionary what actually works: everything below is computed from the 8,610 five-letter words in our word list.

Where the numbers come from

Wordle was created by Josh Wardle in 2021 and has been published by the New York Times since early 2022. The Times keeps a curated list of possible answers, a couple of thousand words long, and accepts a much larger set of valid guesses. Our figures use the 8,610 five-letter words in our five-letter word list, which is close in spirit to the valid-guess list. The exact answer list is the Times's own, so treat these numbers as a very good map, not the official terrain.

The letters that matter

Almost half of all five-letter words contain an S (46.3%) or an E (45.0%). Here are the ten letters most likely to appear in a five-letter word:

A first guess built from the top of this table eliminates or confirms a huge slice of the dictionary in one move. That is the whole trick.

Position matters as much as presence

Knowing a letter is somewhere in the word is useful; knowing where it likes to sit is better. From the same 8,610 words:

Three patterns are worth memorising. Five-letter words like to start with S (12% do). They like a vowel second (A, O, E, I and U between them open 65% of words). And the ending is dominated by S, E and Y — though remember the Times's answer list generally avoids simple plurals, so a grey S in fifth position tells you less than the raw 31% suggests.

Openers, measured

For every five-letter word with five different letters, we computed the share of all 8,610 words that contain at least one of its letters — call it coverage. The best everyday openers by that measure:

And the openers you will see recommended elsewhere:

A fair caveat: coverage is not the only sensible yardstick. The Times's WordleBot and similar tools rank guesses by expected information against the answer list, which is why CRANE tops those rankings while sitting lower here. Both measures agree on the fundamentals, though: an opener wants common letters, no repeats, and ideally an S, an R and two or three vowels. RAISE and ARISE — the same five letters — fit perfectly.

The second guess

After the opener you have a choice: explore with five fresh letters, or exploit what you learned. If your opener came back mostly grey, explore — something like RAISE then CLOUT tests ten distinct letters, including most of the top table above, in two moves. If you landed two or three greens and yellows, exploit them and start narrowing. In hard mode you must reuse revealed letters, which is exactly why hard mode is harder: it takes the explore option away.

Endgame: think in patterns, not letters

Late in the puzzle, stop guessing letters and start listing words. With, say, _IGHT confirmed, run the alphabet against the blank: EIGHT, FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT. Our five-letter list has a built-in solver for exactly this: give it your greens, yellows and greys and it filters all 8,610 words for you — best saved for after the puzzle, or for the post-mortem.

A sensible routine

Open with RAISE or ARISE. If you get little back, follow with a second probe such as CLOUT, which adds five fresh letters. From guess three, work the patterns: respect the positional table, remember E loves fourth place (20% of words put one there), and don't burn a guess on a plural answer. That routine will not win every game — nothing will — but it makes the six guesses you have work as hard as the dictionary allows.