Wordle Openers, Ranked by How Much They Actually Tell You
A first guess isn't for winning — it's for learning. Here's how the famous openers rank when you measure the only thing that matters: information.
Every Wordle conversation eventually becomes an opener argument. Somebody swears by ADIEU. Somebody else hasn't changed from CRANE since 2022. The argument is usually unwinnable because both sides are measuring different things.
So let's measure one thing: how much a first guess tells you. A perfect opener isn't trying to be the answer — out of the thousands of playable five-letter words, the odds of that are tiny. It's trying to shrink the pool of remaining candidates as hard as possible.
What a first guess is actually for
Wordle — the original lives at The New York Times — gives you three kinds of feedback: greens (right letter, right spot), yellows (right letter, wrong spot), and grays. Players fixate on greens, but grays do quiet, brutal work: a gray E eliminates more candidates than almost any green, because E appears in roughly half of all five-letter words.
That's why good openers lean on the most frequent letters — E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N — and never repeat one.
The rankings
CRANE and SLATE sit at the top for the same reason: five distinct high-frequency letters, with R, N, T and L in the positions they most often occupy. TRACE is CRANE's near-twin. RAISE trades a common consonant for a third vowel — still excellent, slightly less positional.
ADIEU and AUDIO are the popular vowel-dumps, and they're not bad — they're just answering the wrong question. Vowels are easy to find because they're everywhere; consonants are what actually distinguish SLATE from PLATE from ELATE.
The NYT's own WordleBot has rated openers this way for years — its long-time favorites are CRANE and SLATE variants, for exactly the letter-frequency reasons above. Independent rankings, like this widely-shared strategy guide, land on the same shortlist.
"Your opener's job is to lose beautifully — to be wrong in the most informative way possible."
Second guesses that pair well
The strongest strategy is a planned one-two punch that covers ten distinct letters. CRANE followed by MOIST or PIOUS covers most of the alphabet's workhorses. SLATE followed by CORNY or ROUND does the same. After two guesses like that, the answer is usually one of a handful of candidates — and skimming 5-letter words starting with S or any other letter list will jog the one you're blanking on.
The traps that end streaks
Three killers, in order: repeated letters (GEESE, LEVEL — test a double early if yellows keep pointing that way), the -IGHT and -ATCH families (five candidates that share four letters; burn a guess like BLIMP to split them), and hard-mode stubbornness (re-using every clue sounds noble until you're guessing MATCH, BATCH, LATCH in sequence).
When a puzzle finally beats you, feed the five letters into the anagram solver and look at what else they could have spelled — it's the fastest way to build the pattern instinct the openers can't give you.
Theo has kept a Wordle streak alive since 2022 and tracks opener performance in a spreadsheet he refuses to apologize for. He covers Wordle, Spelling Bee, and anything the NYT games team ships next.