Best Wordle starting words

Not a hunch list. Every word in our archive was scored against how often its letters actually appear in each position of a real answer.

The openers

Highest score so far: SLATE at 1,255. Play it in practice mode to see how it feels.

Most common letters

How the score works

For every position 1–5 we count how many archive answers carry each letter there. A candidate opener then scores the sum of those five counts: a word whose letters are common in the spots they occupy ranks higher than one with merely popular letters.

Scores are recomputed from the stored answers, so they move as the archive grows. This is a frequency model, not a guarantee — no opener wins every board.