Originally published at: The optimal words to start a game of Wordle | Boing Boing
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I’ve been using ROUTE, but noticed that this tends to eliminate useful letters more than help direct me to correct words, which leads to me wracking my brain trying to find words that are uncommon. Maybe it’s time for a RAISE, instead!
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I like AUDIO. Getting most of the vowels out of the way first thing helps me narrow it down.
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I’m amused at all the various analyses out there, each claiming to have analyzed the data and come up with the best starting word, and each arriving at a different conclusion. Will make a great case study when teaching data science, to get students to question their starting assumptions, and help them realize the word “best” is context dependent.
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I’ve been using STEAR, on the theory I’ll be eliminating most of the most common letters of the alphabet quickly. But I think RAISE is an interesting alternative, because narrowing the vowels quickly is, I’ve found, the best route to winning, so I’ll probably try that out tomorrow.
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i’ve seen all of the following touted as the optimal starting word-- “steal”, “crane”, “stare”, and now “raise”,. i tried the latter this morning and got two yellow and three grey. looking at the actual word once i finished all three of the other words would have given me two yellow and three grey which strikes me as hilarious for some reason. meanwhile “doggo” would have revealed five grey letters. “sauce” would have given me four grey and one yellow while “stare” would have given me two yellow and three grey once again 
edited to add–
that would have given me four grey and one green for what it’s worth.
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I like to try to nail two vowels and 3 common letters for the first guess, but maybe getting 3 vowels is better.
The first two guesses typically are for finding letters, and then I worry about placement.
If I have only 1 or 2 guesses left, I may use this Scrabble word finder for help.
The game got me last week, where I had 4 letter and chased the last one, and guessed poorly.
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FWIW, i use AUDIO as my starting word and got today’s in 3 — one green and knowing exactly which vowels are included is a great start.
But I agree with the bigger point that there are lots of words being tossed out as optimal starting words (i’ve also seen CUMIN and several others), and i think it depends on your play style, whether you play hard mode, and just random luck of what the word is today.
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That’s what I use. Well, not exactly, I use ARISE, but it’s the same letters.
I don’t get why one would use DOGGO as noted in the article.
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I like to just pick a word at random for my first. I find it’s as hard or harder to try to get to any word in a few steps from one consistent starting word than it is to get to any word in a few steps from any other word. I think that’s kind of the beauty of the game though.
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Looks to me like the only assumptions made were in the form of ad-hoc heuristics.
But in this case, the problem is small enough to make entropy maximization computationally tractable: it only takes a couple of minutes to crunch on Aspell’s english word list (5238 words of 5 lowercase letters).
Amusingly, the best starting word for french wordle is RAIES (rays, but also slang for butt cracks)
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i hadn’t played it long enough to know that words with repeated letters can occur. wracking my brain to come up with words that had one vowel and four consonants cost me at least one guess.
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Ack. I try to tell all new players this because the first time it happens it will stump the fuck out of you.
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SPICY is yet to fail me
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Ah, no. You missed my entire point. There is no such thing as “the best” starting word. It depends entirely on who’s playing, what strategy they use, and what mood they’re in that day. For example:
- Do you prefer to eliminate as many common letters as possible first?
- Do you prefer to get as many green and yellow squares as possible first?
- Do you restrict yourself to using green/yellow letters once you have them?
- Are you trying to minimize your average score, or your best score?
- Are you willing to trade a few losses for the chance of some 1-2 guess wins?
- Are you playing to beat your friends/relatives each day, or just to beat your own personal best?
- Are you playing to get the most interesting pattern to share on Twitter, rather than the least guesses? (and how do you define interesting?)
- Are you playing to always win on the 6th guess?
- Are you playing to get a pleasing pattern on your guess distribution chart?
- Are you playing to show off how you can recover from “crazy” start words?
- Are you playing the version that uses yesterday’s wordle as the starting word?
etc. Each one of these attitudes would lead to different choices of likely starting word.
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I’ve been using IRATE. May be more of a mood indicator… 
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1 = Albatross, or hole in one
2 = Eagle
3 = Birdie
4 = par
5 = Bogey
6 = Double Bogey
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As others have said, it’s more about why you are playing than anything else. If you are intent on sharing your grid and you either want to be scoring 2/3 or failing then you use a different strategy.
Anyway, I’ve been enjoying:
https://nerdlegame.com/ (which is a number equation game) and
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ (which is a geography game)
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Interesting, I start with TEARS. From there my second guess varies based on if I get any yellows or greens. But I’ve also been experimenting with GHOUL to clear up the vowels and another common consonant.
