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The Best Wordle Starting Words in English — A Data Analysis

Published May 13, 2026 · 3 min read

Looking for a Wordle starter? We ranked words from 980 English answers by letter frequency at each position: SLATE, SHARE and CRANE lead.

Wordle screenshot of the guess SHARE played against an answer where S is green at position 1, H, A and R are grey, and E is yellow at position 5.
Example: SHARE — S green at position 1, E yellow.

The method: letter frequency and positional value

For each answer word with five different letters, we add up how often each letter appears in its position across the answer list. We divide by the highest total, so the leading word scores 1. This is a frequency ranking, not a calculation of the fewest guesses needed to solve the puzzle. Every recommendation comes from the game’s answer list.

The most common letters in English Wordle

Rank Letter Count Share
1 E 467 9.5%
2 A 432 8.8%
3 R 397 8.1%
4 T 315 6.4%
5 I 306 6.2%
6 O 298 6.1%
7 S 296 6%
8 N 257 5.2%
9 L 256 5.2%
10 C 227 4.6%

Why position is the whole game

  • Position 1: S (17.6 %), C (9.5 %), B (8.5 %), P (6.9 %), F (6.4 %)
  • Position 2: O (13.4 %), R (12.9 %), A (12.7 %), L (10.1 %), I (9.6 %)
  • Position 3: A (17.7 %), I (13.3 %), O (10.1 %), U (8.1 %), R (7.4 %)
  • Position 4: E (12.9 %), N (9.5 %), A (8 %), C (7.9 %), R (7.7 %)
  • Position 5: E (20.2 %), T (12.1 %), Y (10.9 %), D (8.7 %), R (8.2 %)

The best starters by positional score

Rank Word Score
1 SLATE 1.000
2 SHARE 0.991
3 CRANE 0.972
4 SLICE 0.962
5 SHINE 0.956
6 BRACE 0.935
7 SHAKE 0.935
8 SLANT 0.933
9 STARE 0.933
10 SNARE 0.927

Practical recommendation

Choose a word you recognise and can type easily. After the first guess, follow the colours: keep green letters in place, try yellow letters elsewhere, and test new letters where useful. Two different words can share letters, so they do not necessarily test ten different letters.

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This article is based on an automatic analysis of all 980 English Wordle answers in the DailyWordGames.org archive. The data is recomputed on every site build.