What’s the Best Starting Wordle Word?
I was recently turned on to the great word game Wordle, it’s basically the classic “guess the hidden sequence” game Mastermind, but with words instead of color sequences.
The general strategy is clear: Start off guessing words containing a variety of letters, and then as you receive feedback about which letters were correct, try to guess words incorporating those letters.
The question is, before you’ve received any feedback, what’s the best word to guess?
The Best Starting Word
The way the game is designed, all words are common 5-letter Engish words. Specifically, they come from a set of 2500 common English words hand-picked by the creator’s partner.
We can create a comparable dataset for ourselves by grabbing the few thousand most common 5-letter words from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus.
We can then ask, for each of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, how many of these 5-letter words contain that letter? This results in the following set of counts:
E : 1892
A : 1683
S : 1564
R : 1335
O : 1219
I : 1196
N : 1079
…
F : 306
W : 272
V : 241
X : 114
J : 87
Z : 79
Q : 36
In a game like Wordle you’re constantly negotiating a tradeoff between exploring new letters, and exploiting the information about the letters you already have. However on the first turn you have no information to exploit, therefore your best strategy is to explore as many letters as possible, prioritizing those which are most likely to be present in the word.
Therefore the best first Wordle word is one which contains the 5 most common letters: E, A, S, R, and O.
And as it turns out, there is only one* 5-letter English word which contains all of these letters: AROSE
This is the word you should be playing if you want to maximize the number of letters you guess correctly on the first turn.
Happy Wordle’ing!
*EDIT: It turns out there’s another English word containing this combination of letters that’s even better: SOARE
