We played every one of the 8,938 five-letter words in our dictionary against every other one — 79.9 million games — and measured how far each opener narrows the field. The winner is TARES: it cuts 8,938 candidates down to about 205 on average.
| # | Word | Answers left on average | Information |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | TARES | 205 | 6.21 bits |
| 2 | LARES | 194 | 6.17 bits |
| 3 | RALES | 196 | 6.14 bits |
| 4 | RATES | 211 | 6.12 bits |
| 5 | TALES | 217 | 6.09 bits |
| 6 | ARLES | 206 | 6.07 bits |
| 7 | NARES | 209 | 6.07 bits |
| 8 | TEARS | 236 | 6.04 bits |
| 9 | TORES | 244 | 6.03 bits |
| 10 | DARES | 240 | 6.02 bits |
| 11 | REALS | 220 | 6.02 bits |
| 12 | SANER | 214 | 6.02 bits |
| 13 | CARES | 235 | 6.01 bits |
| 14 | LEARS | 222 | 6.00 bits |
| 15 | TIRES | 252 | 6.00 bits |
| 16 | LORES | 227 | 5.99 bits |
| 17 | LANES | 224 | 5.99 bits |
| 18 | PARES | 248 | 5.98 bits |
| 19 | SERAL | 224 | 5.98 bits |
| 20 | ALOES | 216 | 5.97 bits |
| 21 | TEALS | 246 | 5.97 bits |
| 22 | SERAI | 215 | 5.97 bits |
| 23 | ROLES | 230 | 5.96 bits |
| 24 | TRIES | 258 | 5.96 bits |
| 25 | MARES | 247 | 5.95 bits |
ADIEU and AUDIO are the most recommended openers on the internet. Four vowels look efficient, but vowels are not where the information is: consonants like R, S, T and L split the word list far more evenly.
| Word | Rank | Answers left | Information |
|---|---|---|---|
| RAISE | 32 | 235 | 5.92 bits |
| SLATE | 36 | 260 | 5.90 bits |
| STARE | 59 | 254 | 5.84 bits |
| ARISE | 96 | 266 | 5.78 bits |
| LEAST | 160 | 289 | 5.71 bits |
| IRATE | 353 | 328 | 5.57 bits |
| TRACE | 689 | 411 | 5.42 bits |
| CRANE | 800 | 415 | 5.38 bits |
| CANOE | 879 | 408 | 5.35 bits |
| STEAM | 979 | 364 | 5.32 bits |
| ADIEU | 2,541 | 453 | 4.97 bits |
| PIANO | 2,833 | 569 | 4.92 bits |
| AUDIO | 4,074 | 649 | 4.71 bits |
| QUICK | 8,737 | 1908 | 3.27 bits |
| JAZZY | 8,929 | 2566 | 2.49 bits |
| FUZZY | 8,936 | 3541 | 2.31 bits |
Repeated letters and rare consonants waste the guess: these leave almost the whole word list standing.
For every possible opener we assumed each of the 8,938 words could be the answer, worked out the green/yellow/grey pattern Wordle would return (including the duplicate-letter rules) and grouped the outcomes by pattern. A guess that produces many small groups tells you a lot; one that produces a few huge groups tells you little. “Answers left” is the size of the group you land in, averaged over every answer; “information” is the same thing in bits (each bit halves the field).
Two caveats worth stating. The ranking uses our own 8,938-word five-letter list, which includes uncommon words such as LARES and ARLES; the New York Times picks its answers from a smaller set of everyday words, so a common word like RATES or STARE is the safer pick in practice, and it only costs a handful of candidates. And this measures the first guess only — after that, what matters is using the letters you already know.
Data generated on 2026-09-22. The full ranking for all 8,938 words is available as wordle-openers.json — free to use with a link back to this page.
Once you have greens and yellows, the opener stops mattering. Feed what you know into the Wordle solver to see the words that still fit, or browse the lists by letter: