The best Wordle starting words: and why they work
Every Wordle player has a favorite opener. Most of them are defensible. But not all openers do the same thing, some test vowels, some test common consonants, and a few hedge between the two. Here’s what each one actually buys you.
What a good opener actually does
You have six guesses. A good opener doesn’t try to win on move one, it tries to eliminate the most words possiblefrom the answer pool, no matter what colors come back. That’s an information-theory question, not a vibes question: the best openers maximize expected entropy reduction across the answer list.
In practice that translates to three rules: cover the common vowels (E, A, O, I), include high-frequency consonants (especially R, S, T, N, L), and avoid repeated letters in the same guess. Past those constraints, top-tier openers are within a few percentage points of each other on actual solve-rate. Pick one and stop overthinking it.
ADIEU, the vowel hammer
Strengths:Four vowels in one guess (A, I, E, U). On Melio Wordle’s ~400-word answer list, ADIEU touches at least one vowel in the answer 91% of the time. That’s a lot of yellow tiles in exchange for very little risk.
Weaknesses: Only one consonant (D), and not a particularly common one. If ADIEU comes back all-yellow, you know there are vowels in the word but you have no idea which consonants to test next.
Verdict: Strong opener for players who like to lock vowels first and brute-force consonants second. Pair with a high-consonant follow-up like STORK or NYMPH.
CRANE, the analytical favorite
Strengths: Two of the five most common English letters (R, E) plus C and N. Every letter is in a statistically likely position: C at the front, E at the back. The 3Blue1Brown bot famously identified CRANE as near-optimal in raw information-theory terms.
Weaknesses:Only one vowel. If CRANE comes back nothing-but-grey, you’ve eliminated five common letters but you also have to guess again with very little positional info.
Verdict: The opener for players who want the highest mathematical expected value on guess one. Slight edge over ADIEU when paired well.
RAISE, the all-rounder
Strengths: Three vowels (A, I, E) plus R and S, covers more of the most-common letters than any other five-letter word. The S in position 5 is a particularly common ending.
Weaknesses: RAISE itself is in the answer pool of some Wordle variants, which means you risk solving on guess one and losing all the information you would have gotten from a non-answer opener.
Verdict: The best balanced choice for casual players. Tests three vowels AND two top consonants. If you only want to memorize one opener, this is the one.
AROSE, the workhorse
Strengths: Three vowels (A, O, E) plus R and S. Same general profile as RAISE, but with O instead of I. Slightly stronger when the answer is suspected to use a less-common vowel.
Weaknesses:O is less common as a Wordle answer vowel than I, statistically. You’re testing a slightly weaker vowel for marginal positional benefit.
Verdict: Functionally interchangeable with RAISE. Pick whichever you like the look of.
SOARE, the tryhard pick
Strengths: Maximizes letter-frequency score by cramming three vowels plus S and R into a single guess. Per several Wordle-solver bots, SOARE has the highest single-guess expected entropy reduction of any five-letter word.
Weaknesses:SOARE means “a young hawk”, it’s an obscure word that not every dictionary accepts. Melio Wordle’s ~3,500-word guess list includes SOARE, but the official NYT version does not.
Verdict:Only worth using if you’ve memorized which Wordles accept it. On Melio it’s accepted; on NYT it’s not.
The pair strategy: openers 1 and 2 together
Top players don’t pick one opener, they memorize a two-word combo that together tests ten different letters, regardless of what guess one comes back with. The most popular pairs:
- CRANE + DOILY, covers C, R, A, N, E, D, O, I, L, Y. Tests every common vowel and the seven most-frequent consonants.
- SOARE + UNTIL, covers S, O, A, R, E, U, N, T, I, L. Hits all five vowels.
- ADIEU + STORK, covers A, D, I, E, U, S, T, O, R, K. Heavy on vowels first, then heavy on consonants.
Whichever pair you choose, the goal is the same: by the end of guess 2, you’ve learned the disposition of ten different letters and you can usually solve on guess 3 or 4 from the constraints that remain.
Hard mode changes everything
In hard mode, every revealed clue (green or yellow) must be reused in subsequent guesses. That kills the two-opener strategy: if guess 1 returns yellow letters, you can’t play a completely-different second word, you have to include the yellows.
For hard mode, the strongest openers are ones that minimize the chance of getting trapped. CRANE and RAISE both work well because their letters tend to recur in answer words; ADIEU is riskier because all-vowel results force awkward follow-ups.
The honest bottom line
Solve rates across the top five openers (ADIEU, CRANE, RAISE, AROSE, SOARE) sit within about 0.05 average-guesses of each other on a 2,500-word answer list. The opener matters less than what you do on guesses 2 and 3.
Pick whichever opener you remember. Get good at reading yellow and green positionally. That’s where the actual skill ceiling is.