Your first guess in Wordle is not really a guess at the answer. It is a question about which letters are in play, and some questions teach you far more than others. The best openers test the letters that turn up in the most words, with no letter wasted on a repeat.
Across the everyday five-letter words in our word list, E appears in about half of them, S in 44%, A in 39% and R in 34%, followed by O, T, L and I at around a quarter each. A first guess built from those letters rules out or confirms a large share of the possible answers in one go.
Measured by how many words their letters appear in, AROSE, STARE, RAISE and ARISE sit at the top, with SLATE close behind. Popular vowel-heavy openers do worse than they look: AUDIO tests four vowels but skips R, S, T and L, and ranks over a thousand places lower. Five different letters always beat a word with a repeat, since a doubled letter asks the same question twice.
Position matters too. S is the most common first letter, A and O are common second letters, and E is the fourth letter in nearly a quarter of these words. Our counts include plurals, and Wordle answers are rarely plurals, so an S in the last spot is less likely than the numbers suggest. When a letter turns yellow, try it in the spot where it is most common next.
Unless the first guess lit up several tiles, spend the second on five new letters. After RAISE, a word like CLOUT tests C, L, O, U and T without repeating anything, so two guesses have covered ten of the most useful letters. In hard mode you must reuse what you have found, so the first guess matters even more.
Enter your board in the Wordle helper to see every word that still fits, likely answers first, along with the letters that appear in the most remaining words, which are the ones worth testing next.
