Every Wordle player has an opinion about the best starting word. Almost nobody checks the worst one — which is a shame, because the gap between a good opener and a bad one is far larger than the gap between the good ones.
So we measured it. We took all 1,892 words that have ever been a Wordle answer, used each one as an opening guess against every other, and counted how many possible answers it leaves behind. Fewer is better. The best opener leaves about 50. The worst leaves 739.
How the measurement works
When you play an opener, the colors sort every possible answer into groups. Guess IRATE and the answers that would come back all-gray land in one group, the ones with a green E land in another, and so on. Your remaining work is whatever group you land in.
So the score for an opener is simple: on average, how many answers are still possible after you play it? A word that splits the list into lots of small groups scores well. A word that dumps most answers into one enormous group scores badly.
By that measure the best opener in the set is IRATE, at 50.1 answers left. Everything below is compared against it.
The ten worst Wordle starting words
| Opener | Answers left | vs IRATE | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| FUZZY | 739 | 15x worse | Two Zs and a Y |
| MUMMY | 699 | 14x worse | Three Ms and a Y |
| PUPPY | 669 | 13x worse | Three Ps and a Y |
| VIVID | 651 | 13x worse | Two Vs and two Is |
| JIFFY | 623 | 12x worse | Two Fs and a J |
| FIZZY | 618 | 12x worse | Two Zs and a Y |
| CIVIC | 596 | 12x worse | Two Cs and two Is |
| JAZZY | 590 | 12x worse | Two Zs and a J |
| FLUFF | 585 | 12x worse | Three Fs and an L |
| BUGGY | 554 | 11x worse | Two Gs and a Y |
FUZZY is not just bad, it is fifteen times worse than IRATE. Play it and you have spent a guess to narrow 1,892 answers down to roughly 739 — barely more than flipping the board in half. Play IRATE and you are down to about 50.
Look at the "why" column and the pattern is immediate. Every single one of the ten worst openers repeats a letter, and eight of the ten also carry a rare one.
The three ways to ruin an opener
| Opener contains | Words | Average answers left |
|---|---|---|
| All five letters different | 1,302 | 142 |
| One repeated letter | 549 | 231 |
| Two or more repeats | 41 | 394 |
| No rare letters (J Q X Z V W K) | 1,369 | 162 |
| A rare letter | 523 | 205 |
| Only one distinct vowel | 766 | 226 |
| Two distinct vowels | 1,014 | 139 |
| Three distinct vowels | 104 | 117 |
Repeating a letter is the biggest self-inflicted wound. Openers with one repeat leave 231 answers on average against 142 for openers with five different letters — a 63% penalty. Two repeats nearly triples it.
The reason is blunt: a second copy of a letter tells you almost nothing the first copy did not. You have five slots and you just spent one of them twice. It is worth knowing that 31% of Wordle answers do contain a repeated letter — repeats matter enormously in the answer, which is what our guide to double-letter Wordle words covers. They just have no business in your opening guess.
Rare letters are the second problem. Openers containing J, Q, X, Z, V, W or K leave 205 answers on average against 162 for those without. A Z that comes back gray eliminates almost nothing, because hardly any answers contained a Z to begin with.
Test yourself
Three pairs. Pick the worse opener in each, then open the answer.
ADIEU, and it is not close. ADIEU leaves 98.7 answers; STERN leaves 80.2.
ADIEU has four vowels and STERN has one. The four-vowel word still loses, because STERN spends four of its five slots on S, T, R and N — four of the most common consonants in English.
PUPPY, at 669 answers left against PIZZA's 379. Both are poor, but PUPPY wastes three slots on the same letter and adds a Y. PIZZA at least tests two different common letters in P and A.
Barely. SLATE leaves 57.5, CRANE leaves 60.9. A three-answer difference is noise next to the 689-answer gap between the best and worst openers. Once you are in this range, arguing about which is better is wasted effort — the win was avoiding FUZZY.
The popular opener that quietly underperforms
Here is where it gets awkward for a piece of advice you have probably been given. ADIEU is twice as bad as IRATE, and AUDIO is three times as bad.
| Opener | Answers left | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| IRATE | 50 | Excellent |
| RAISE | 50 | Excellent |
| SLATE | 58 | Excellent |
| TRACE | 57 | Excellent |
| CRANE | 61 | Good |
| TEARS | 61 | Good |
| ROAST | 67 | Good |
| STERN | 80 | Mediocre |
| SAINT | 88 | Mediocre |
| OCEAN | 95 | Mediocre |
| ADIEU | 99 | Mediocre |
| PIANO | 111 | Weak |
| MONEY | 133 | Weak |
| AUDIO | 149 | Weak |
| QUERY | 189 | Bad |
| LUCKY | 282 | Bad |
| HAPPY | 312 | Bad |
| PIZZA | 379 | Bad |
The usual reasoning for ADIEU is that it tests four of the five vowels at once. That part is true. The problem is what it costs: four of your five slots go to vowels, leaving exactly one consonant tested.
And this is the part worth being precise about, because the simple version of this claim is wrong. Vowels are not the problem. Openers with three distinct vowels average 117 answers left — the best group of all. Two vowels average 139. One vowel averages 226, the worst.
Vowels help, right up until the fourth one. Three vowels plus two common consonants is the sweet spot, which is exactly what IRATE and RAISE are. ADIEU takes the idea one step too far and pays a consonant for it.
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The practical takeaway is smaller than it looks. You do not need the mathematically perfect opener. You need to not play a bad one.
Five different letters. No J, Q, X, Z, V, W or K. Two or three vowels. At least two of R, S, T, L, N. Any word meeting those four conditions lands in the 50–70 range, and the difference between them is noise.
IRATE, RAISE, ARISE, SLATE, CRATE, TRACE and CRANE all qualify. So do dozens of others. We ranked the strongest performers in our data analysis of the best Wordle starting words, and the same logic drives our letter frequency breakdown — the consonants that appear most often are the ones worth testing first.
Common questions
FUZZY. Against every word that has been a Wordle answer it leaves about 739 possibilities, roughly fifteen times as many as IRATE at 50. MUMMY, PUPPY and VIVID are close behind.
Not really. ADIEU leaves about 99 possible answers, twice as many as IRATE. Testing four vowels sounds efficient, but it means only one consonant gets tested, and consonants do most of the eliminating.
They are the single most costly mistake. Openers with a repeated letter leave 231 answers on average, against 142 for openers with five different letters. A second copy of a letter tells you almost nothing new.
SLATE, by about three answers — 57.5 against 60.9. That difference is meaningless in practice. Both are strong, and choosing between them matters far less than avoiding a repeated letter.
Method: every one of the 1,892 words that has been a Wordle answer was scored as an opening guess against all the others, using Wordle's real coloring rules including duplicate-letter handling. The figure quoted is the expected number of answers still possible after that opener. The live answer pool also contains words that have not yet been used, so exact numbers will shift slightly — the ranking and the size of the gaps will not. Data current to 20 September 2026.