Wordle is the daily online word game in which you try to guess today's five-letter word in a few guesses as possible. Coloured clues are given for correct letters in the right or wrong positions.
T
H
I
N
G
G
U
E
S
S
S
U
G
A
R
Everyone in the world gets the same word on the same day. It's a delightfully simple low-fi ad-free game which millions are playing. And the pressure is always there to guess correctly in as few rows as possible... in which case a few Wordle tips might just be useful.
There are 2315 possible Wordle solutions.
The 2315 words were selected by the game's inventor Josh Wardle, then shuffled into a random order. That random order is now fixed and each day's word is the next on the list. It'll take just over six years to work through the entire sequence before it repeats. Wordle 0 was on June 19th 2021. Wordle 2314 will be on October 20th 2027. Today is day 221.
The first ten words, had anyone been playing other than Josh's partner, were CIGAR, REBUT, SISSY, HUMPH, AWAKE, BLUSH. FOCAL, EVADE, NAVAL and SERVE.
Thelist is part of the code which powers the webpage so can be extracted and analysed. Potentially this is a massive spoiler because you can work out what's coming next, but that would be entirely self-defeating. Instead let's concentrate on what the overall bank of 2315 words can tell us because that might help us to make better guesses.
Two-thirds of Wordle words consist of five different letters.
This means repeated letters crop up quite a lot.
30% of words have one repeated letter.
1.6% of words have two repeated letters (that's about 6 words a year)
0.8% of words have a letter repeated three times (that's about 3 words a year)
Only one word consists of just two different letters (and it's not due to appear until 2027, so don't worry about it).
The most common letter, unsurprisingly, is E.
E appears in 46% of Wordle words, i.e. just under half.
A is next (39%), then R (36%), then O and T (29%), then L and I (28%) then S (27%), then N (24%).
This is not the same as letter frequency in wider English, which is ETAONRISH.
For Wordle the letter order is EAROTLISN, because five-letter words have a structure all of their own.
The least common letters are J, Q, X and Z, which you should only see once every two or three months.
Next come V, W, K and F, each of which might appear two or three times a month.
Full frequency order is EAROTLISNUCYHDPGMBVWKFJQXZ.
This suggests a good starting word might be ORATE.
(or LATER, if you want a word that's actually in the list of solutions)
But if you want green tiles, not just coloured tiles, it might be more useful to know whereabouts in the word the letters usually are.
E, for example, is much more likely to be the last letter than the first letter.
A, by contrast, more normally appears in second or third position.
S, meanwhile, is more likely to be the first letter than anything else.
Because I've bashed the statistics I can do you a full (ordered, coloured) spreadsheet.
E is the final letter in 424 of Wordle's answers, that's 18%.
It's the fourth letter in 13%, second in 10%, third in 8% but first in only 3%.
The two most striking outliers are S and Y. 1 in every 6 words starts with S, and 1 in every 6 words ends in Y.
Wordle's list doesn't include plurals, so S is the final letter only about once every two months.
Other letters most likely to come first are C, P, M, G, B, F, W, Q and J.
Other letters most likely to come last are T, N, D and K.
The most predictable position is last place, which is E, R, T or Y 54% of the time.
As for the second letter, that's one of AEHILORU 80% of the time.
Vowels turn out to be quite position-specific. The second letter is a vowel just over half the time. The third letter is a vowel almost exactly half the time.
Meanwhile the first letter is a consonant 86% of the time, i.e. six days a week.
Wordle uses American spellings, which can be awkward for UK players.
A few weeks ago the answer was FAVOR, which caused quite a FUROR.
By my calculations there are about 20 US-specific spellings in the word bank, including ARMOR, SAVOR and TUMOR.
That trio are lined up for 2026, don't worry, but expect about three US blips a year.
I fear the internet may melt down on the day FANNY emerges.
Also the list contains a tiny number of really unfamiliar words.
Overwhelmingly Josh chose well-known ones... (of the 12972 words allowed as guesses, only 2315 are used as solutions)
...but words like DROIT, FICUS and HAUTE are in there too.
Again that trio are a very long way in the future - all in 2027 - but be prepared for the occasional vocabulary bomb to wipe out your winning streak.
Whatever, Wordle's just a bit of fun so let's not ruin it.
Instead consider these a few tips that might help you guess more quickly more often in future.
For a more forensic analysis see Bertrand Fan's blogpost The Best Starting Word in WORDLE, which he published in November way before the rest of the world caught on. He reckons the best starting word is SOARE, an obsolete word that means “a young hawk”, because that has the really popular letters in really popular positions. Kick off with SOARE and you should get at least one green letter 50.4% of the time.
