The 5 Wordle opening words a math nerd ranked. ADIEU is not the answer.

I have, with the patience of a person whose hobbies have replaced their friends, spent the last six weeks running Wordle simulations against the public Wordle answer list. The simulations test every five-letter starter word against every possible solution and measure two things: average solve length, and the variance of solve length. The result is a ranking of starter words from “you should genuinely use this every day” to “why do you do this to yourself.”

The headline finding: ADIEU is not in the top 100. ADIEU has never been in the top 100. ADIEU’s reputation as a great Wordle starter is based on the fact that it has four vowels, and the assumption that vowels are the most important letters to test first. Information theory says: nope. Vowels are common, but consonants are more discriminating. The five most useful letters to test first — by a respectable margin — are E, A, R, S, and T.

Rearrange those into a word and you get the actual answer. Two answers, in fact, that are statistically nearly tied for first place.

The five best opening words, ranked by expected information gain

1. CRANE — average solve: 3.55 guesses

CRANE has, since 2022, been the WordleBot’s recommended starter, and the simulations confirm it. The C, R, and N are all reasonably common consonants. The A and E are the two most common vowels. Most importantly, CRANE rarely produces a starter where you have too many letter matches — the worst-case scenario for opening guesses, which is what makes a starter feel “lucky” but actually slows you down.

The result: CRANE produces a remarkably consistent solve curve. You’ll rarely solve in 2 guesses with CRANE. You’ll also rarely solve in 5 or 6. Most days you’ll be done in 3 or 4. That consistency is the reason CRANE wins.

2. TRACE — average solve: 3.57 guesses

The new contender. With the recent WordleBot rebalancing, TRACE has bumped from third place to a near-tie for first. The math is straightforward: TRACE substitutes T (slightly more common in 5-letter answers than N) for the N in CRANE, gaining a small but real edge.

If you have been a CRANE devotee for two years, switching to TRACE will not change your win rate. It will, on average, save you about 1 in 30 guesses over a 100-day period. Statistically real, practically negligible. Our news piece on the WordleBot rebalancing covers the methodology change.

3. SLATE — average solve: 3.58 guesses

SLATE was the WordleBot’s recommended starter for most of 2023 and 2024. It’s still excellent. The S and L are both highly informative consonants — S in particular is helpful because it eliminates one of the most common Wordle answer-letter positions when it doesn’t appear (Wordle answers very rarely contain S in position 5, for instance, because the puzzle excludes plural nouns).

If you’ve been using SLATE for two years and don’t want to switch, don’t. The cost of changing is bigger than the benefit.

4. CRATE — average solve: 3.59 guesses

The runner-up to CRANE for years. CRATE has the same C-R-T-E backbone, swapping the N for an A. It performs almost identically in simulations and is the answer many WordleBot users converged on independently before the bot started recommending CRANE explicitly.

5. STARE / STORE / RAISE — average solve: 3.61–3.65 guesses

This is where the curve flattens. Any reasonable five-letter word with two of {E, A, R, S, T} will land in this range. STARE, STORE, RAISE, ARISE, RAINS, REINS — all within a handful of percentage points of each other. None of them is a meaningful upgrade over the top three. None of them is a meaningful downgrade.

If your favorite Wordle opener is on this list, congratulations: you have, by trial and error, converged on a starter that is statistically indistinguishable from the optimal one. Stop changing it.

The five worst opening words, by way of contrast

Words I tested that performed badly: ADIEU (3.94), AUDIO (3.96), QUEUE (4.31), FUZZY (4.40), MUMMY (4.48). The pattern is the same: too many vowels, too many repeated letters, or a starting letter (Q, F, Z) that’s too rare to be informative.

The genuine worst opener I tested was JIVES, which sounds reasonable but contains a J (almost never used in Wordle answers) and a V (likewise). JIVES averages 4.51 guesses. CRANE averages 3.55. The difference — about one full guess on average — will, over the course of 100 days, cause JIVES players to lose roughly twice as often as CRANE players.

The starter-word debate is, mostly, over

For two years there were genuine debates about which Wordle starter was best. Those debates have largely resolved. The current consensus, both from the WordleBot and from independent simulators (most of which run their own Monte Carlo against the public Wordle answer list), is that CRANE and TRACE are essentially tied at the top, with SLATE and CRATE in close third. Anything else is either a personal preference (fine) or a statistical mistake (less fine).

If you’re a casual player and your starter is something like AUDIO or ADIEU — a vowel-stuffed word your friend told you about in 2022 — switching to CRANE will cost you nothing and save you, on average, half a guess per day. That’s a 14% improvement in average solve length. It’s the cheapest skill upgrade in word puzzles.

The other half of the question is what to do on guess two, which is a longer conversation involving a separate set of starters (typically chosen to maximize information given the feedback from guess one). The short version: PLOUC, MOUNT, or POINT are all good guess-two starters if your CRANE returned all gray, and you should pick the one whose remaining letters work best with whatever feedback you got on guess one.

That’s a longer guide. For now: CRANE. Or TRACE. The difference is statistical noise.