"Use CRANE" or "SLATE" is the most-repeated piece of Wordle advice on the internet. It's mostly right — but it's stated as folklore, almost never as math. We took the full 2,315-word Wordle answer list, computed Shannon entropy for every plausible opener, and ranked them. We also asked: which answers does the best opener leave you blind to?

This report is a data-first companion to the Wordle strategy genre. Every statistic below is computed deterministically against the public answer list — no surveys, no opinions, no LLM hallucinations. Journalists and researchers covering Wordle: the raw analysis script and full ranked outputs are available on request — see the press kit at the bottom.

1. Letter frequency, by position

The flat "which letters appear most" question is easy: across all 11,575 letters in Wordle answers, the order is E (10.65%), A (8.46%), R (7.77%), O (6.51%), T (6.30%), L (6.21%), I (5.80%), S (5.78%), N (4.97%), C (4.12%). But aggregate frequency hides the more useful fact: Wordle answers are highly non-uniform by position.

Position 1 — the start letter is dominated by S

Almost 1 in 6 Wordle answers (15.8%) starts with the letter S. C, B, T, and P round out the top 5. Vowels are almost never first — the most common starting vowel is A, appearing first in just 6.0% of answers.

Position 5 — the end letter is dominated by E and Y

Over a third of Wordle answers end in either E (18.3%) or Y (15.7%). Add T, R, and L and you've covered 60% of all final letters. The letter S — which dominates the start — is almost absent from the end (only 36 answers end in S, 1.6%). This is deliberate: the original Wordle list was scrubbed of most plurals.

Positions 2, 3, and 4 — where vowels live

Inside the word, vowels take over. The middle three positions are ruled by A, O, I, and E:

• Position 2: A (13.1%), O (12.1%), R (11.5%), E (10.5%), I (8.7%)
• Position 3: A (13.3%), I (11.5%), O (10.5%), E (7.6%), U (7.1%)
• Position 4: E (13.7%), N (7.9%), S (7.4%), A (7.0%), L (7.0%)

The practical takeaway: your opening word should ideally test S or C at position 1, a vowel at positions 2–4, and E, Y, T, or R at position 5. That intuition is exactly what shows up in the math below.

2. The mathematically best opening word

An opening word's job is to maximize how many feedback patterns it can produce against the answer list — because each distinct pattern is a different "split" of the remaining candidates. The more patterns, and the more evenly distributed they are, the more information you extract from one guess. Information theory has a one-line answer: pick the word that maximizes Shannon entropy over the 2,315 possible target words.

We ran the calculation against the standard answer list. The top-15 openers by expected information gain:

A few things to notice:

• The theoretical maximum is log₂(2,315) ≈ 11.18 bits. The best real opener gets you 5.886 bits — a little over half the way home in a single guess.
• SOARE narrowly beats SLATE and CRANE. SOARE is uncommon as English, but it's a valid Wordle guess. If you can stomach a non-word-feeling opener, it's the optimal first move.
• SLATE and CRATE are the best "real words" you'd actually say out loud. They're within 0.05 bits of the top — a negligible practical difference.
• CRANE — the opener Wordle's own Bot recommends — comes in noticeably below the top tier at 5.743 bits. It's good, but it leaves about 0.14 bits on the table versus SOARE.

3. The 263 hardest answers (after opening with CRANE)

Even with a near-optimal opener, some Wordle answers leave you almost no information. The worst-case scenario is the all-gray feedback pattern — every letter wrong, no positional hits.

When you open with CRANE and see all gray, 263 of the 2,315 answers (11.4%) are still on the table. That's not a "narrow it down" feedback — that's a "throw away 88.6% and start fresh" feedback. Some of the answers in that 263:

The defining feature: these answers contain no C, R, A, N, or E. They lean heavily on B, D, M, P, S, T, plus the vowels I, O, U, and Y. Doubled-letter words (BIDDY, BILLY, BOBBY) are over-represented here — because the answer "wastes" a slot on a duplicate, the surviving letter palette is even smaller.

If your day-one opener returns all gray, the most informative second guess is one that probes B, D, M, P, T, I, O, U, Y. A good second opener for this scenario: DUMPY, HUMID, or STUDY. The point is: optimal play is two-step, not one-step. The "always use CRANE" advice oversimplifies a problem that genuinely has bad days.

The other tough patterns after CRANE

Beyond all-gray, four more CRANE feedback patterns each leave 100+ answers in play:

• Only A is yellow (gray-gray-yellow-gray-gray): 134 answers — ABBOT, ABOUT, ABYSS, ADMIT, ADOPT, and 129 others
• Only E is yellow (gray-gray-gray-gray-yellow): 127 answers — BEEFY, BEFIT, BEGET, BELLY, BELOW…
• R and E are yellow (gray-yellow-gray-gray-yellow): 122 answers — BERET, BERRY, BERTH, BLUER, BOXER…
• E is green at position 5 (gray-gray-gray-gray-green): 102 answers — BELIE, BELLE, BIBLE, BILGE, BIOME…

Five feedback patterns from a single CRANE opener leave you with 748 answers still on the table — about a third of the entire game. The lesson: there's no opener that turns Wordle into a guaranteed 3-guess game. The hard days are real, mathematically.

4. Vowel and repeat-letter patterns

Vowels per word

Most Wordle answers (57.8%) have exactly two vowels. Single-vowel words are the next-largest group at 31.7%. The extremes are vanishingly rare:

The 13 vowel-less answers

Exactly 13 Wordle answers contain no A, E, I, O, or U. In every case, Y is doing the work of a vowel. The full list — every one of these has caught players off-guard at least once in Wordle history:

The 3 four-vowel answers

Only three answers have four vowels out of five letters: AUDIO, EERIE, and QUEUE. AUDIO is famous as a chess-opening style "vowel-test" first guess. QUEUE has the additional twist of repeating both U and E. EERIE has three E's — itself a statistical outlier.

Repeat letters

Just under a third of answers (32.4%, 749 words) contain a repeated letter. The repeat is often two of the same vowel (BOOZY, GREEN, MOOSE) or a doubled consonant before a Y or E (BOBBY, NANNY, PUPPY). A smaller group — 20 answers in total — contain three of the same letter:

These twenty are statistically the hardest answers in Wordle, because each repeat costs you a "slot" of information. Two-thirds of the word's color signal is being spent on one letter.

5. Common shapes: bigrams and word endings

The most-frequent two-letter sequences ("bigrams") in Wordle answers:

The most-common three-letter endings, sorted by frequency:

• -ING (23 answers): living gerund-style words like BRING, CLING, FLING, STING
• -LLY (22): adverbial doublings — BELLY, DILLY, JOLLY, SILLY
• -TCH (18): CATCH, FETCH, HITCH, PATCH
• -TER (16): AFTER, ALTER, ENTER, LATER
• -ACK (15): BLACK, CRACK, KNACK, SHACK

Knowing that -ER, -LY, -CH, -SE, and -AL together account for over 14% of all Wordle endings is a strong second-guess heuristic. If your first three letters land green but the last two are gray, your best move is to try common endings rather than scattershot letter checks.

6. What this means for Wordle strategy

Three practical takeaways from the data:

1. SOARE, ROATE, and RAISE are mathematically optimal openers — but SLATE and CRATE are within a rounding error. If you want to feel like a real person playing a word game, SLATE is the right answer. The 0.03-bit gap to SOARE will cost you a guess on perhaps one in three thousand puzzles.

2. Your opener will leave you blind one day in nine. Roughly 11% of Wordle answers will return all-gray against CRANE. Have a "rare-letter probe" second guess ready — DUMPY, HUMID, or PILOT work well — for that scenario. Don't waste a turn on another vowel-heavy guess.

3. The 33 hardest answers have either zero vowels or three of the same letter. CRYPT, NYMPH, PYGMY, GLYPH, MAMMA, EERIE, PUPPY — these are the answers that have produced the most "I broke my streak" tweets in Wordle's history. If you've seen four guesses come back nearly all gray, the answer is more likely than you'd think to be in this 33-word outlier set.

Press kit & citation

Suggested citation:

Embeddable data: Every chart and statistic in this report — letter frequencies, opener entropy rankings, CRANE-pattern groupings — can be freely republished with attribution back to thewordbee.com. For listicle journalists writing "best Wordle starting word" pieces, we can provide head-to-head openers and the exact answers each one struggles against.

Try it yourself

Every one of the 2,315 Wordle answers is playable for free on our daily Wordle game. We also publish six other daily word games (Spelling Bee, Connections, Crossword, Word Search, Scramble, Wordfall) and a free Anagram Solver. All free, all browser-based, no signup.

If this report was useful, you'll likely also enjoy our companion report: The State of Daily Word Games 2026 — a similar deep-data treatment of 2,578 Spelling Bee puzzles.

About this report: Produced by The Word Bee Editorial. The Word Bee is an independent word-puzzle publisher running eight daily games, free forever, no signup required. Launched February 2025. Read more about the site →