We tested every word against 1,810 real Wordle answers to find the openers that narrow the field fastest. A great first guess isn’t about luck — it’s about information.
Played against all 1,810 past answers, IRATE cuts the list of possible answers down to about 47.6 on average — the smallest of any word we tested. The reason is simple: it loads up on the letters that show up most often (A, R, E, T, I) and spreads them across the board, so the green/yellow/gray feedback splits the answer list into small, even piles. A typical word leaves around 165.7 candidates standing, and the worst common-shaped opener, FUZZY, leaves a brutal ~705.8.
The job of your first guess isn’t to be right — it’s to eliminate as many wrong answers as possible. Mathematically, the best opener is the one that, on average, leaves you with the fewest remaining candidates after you see the colors. The strongest openers all share three traits:
Ranked by the average number of possible answers left after the guess — shorter bars are better.
The words people actually start with — and where they land in our ranking.
| Opener | Avg. left | Bits | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| AUDIO | ~143.5 | 4.605 | #895 |
| STARE | ~54.5 | 5.841 | #10 |
| CRANE | ~57.6 | 5.778 | #16 |
| SLATE | ~54.9 | 5.864 | #11 |
| RAISE | ~48.4 | 5.837 | #2 |
| TRACE | ~53.4 | 5.891 | #5 |
| IRATE | ~47.6 | 5.878 | #1 |
| ARISE | ~50.2 | 5.799 | #3 |
For every candidate opener we played it against all 1810 real Wordle answers and grouped those answers by the green/yellow/gray pattern the opener would show. An opener's score is its expected number of remaining candidates — the sum of (group size)² ÷ total across all patterns. Lower means the guess slices the answer list into smaller, more even pieces, which is exactly what a strong opener does.
We also report the same idea as expected information in bits — higher means more of the answer space ruled out — and the two measures agree on the winners. The corpus is 1,810 real Wordle answers we’ve tracked; openers were drawn from that same set so every guess is a legal word.
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