360 Best Starting Words
Five letter openers ranked by how much they tell you. No repeated letters, drawn from 8,079 candidates.
What This List Is
These are 360 five letter words ranked by how much they tell you when you play them first. They are drawn from the 8,079 five letter words that use five different letters, which in turn come from 12,578 five letter words in total.
The ranking is a coverage score. For every word, we count how many of the 12,578 five letter words contain each of its letters, then add those five numbers together. A word made of letters that appear in a great many words scores highly, because playing it eliminates or confirms more of the board than a word made of rare letters does.
By that measure the strongest opener in the dictionary is AEROS.
Why Repeated Letters Are Excluded
Every word on this list uses five different letters, and that is not an arbitrary filter. A first guess has exactly five slots and its only job is to buy information. Spending two of those slots on the same letter throws one of them away, because the second copy can tell you almost nothing the first did not already tell you.
That is why a word like SASSY is a poor opener despite being a perfectly good word. Three of its five slots are spent on S. You will finish the turn knowing about three letters instead of five.
The exclusion cuts the pool from 12,578 words to 8,079, which is a reminder of how many five letter words repeat a letter. Roughly a third of them do.
The Letters That Actually Matter
Counting across all 12,578 five letter words, these are the ten letters that appear in the most of them, in order:
S, E, A, R, O, I, L, T, N, U
Any opener built mostly from that group will rank near the top of this list, and any opener built from J, Q, X, Z or V will rank near the bottom regardless of how good a word it is. This is the whole theory of opening guesses in one line: play common letters first, save rare letters for when the puzzle has told you one is there.
It also explains why so many recommended openers look alike. There are only so many ways to arrange the same handful of high frequency letters into a real word, so the top of any coverage ranking is always going to be a cluster of anagrams of each other.
How To Use The List
Pick one and keep it
The single biggest gain is consistency, not optimality. A player who opens with the same strong word every day learns exactly what each result pattern means and gets faster at the second guess. A player who improvises a new opener daily is solving a fresh problem every time. Any word in the top fifty here is strong enough that the difference between them is smaller than the difference consistency makes.
Pair it with a second word that shares no letters
The bigger jump is choosing a fixed second guess that overlaps your first as little as possible. Two words that between them cover ten different letters, most of them common, will usually leave you with a very small set of candidates by guess three. Pick your opener from this list, then scan down for another word that shares none of its letters. The Random Word Generator, set to five letters, is a quick way to shortlist candidates.
Do not chase a lucky first guess
Opening words get judged on how often they solve the puzzle in one, which is the wrong measure. A one in several thousand chance is not a strategy. Judge an opener by how small a candidate list it leaves behind, which is what coverage measures.
Coverage is not the only reasonable metric
Stated plainly so you can decide for yourself: this list ranks by how many words contain each letter anywhere. It does not weight by position, and it does not weight by which words are likely to be chosen as answers rather than merely allowed as guesses. Both are defensible refinements. Neither changes the top of the list much, because the same common letters dominate under every method.
Hard Mode Changes The Calculation
Most of these games offer a hard mode where any letter you have confirmed must be reused in every later guess. If you play that way, the advice above needs one adjustment and it is a significant one.
In normal play your second guess can ignore everything the first one told you and simply cover five more letters, which is why a disjoint pair works so well. In hard mode you cannot do that. Confirmed letters are locked into position and your second guess has to be a real word that fits them, so its coverage is whatever is left over.
The practical consequence is that a strong opener matters more in hard mode, not less. A weak first guess leaves you locked into a bad position with fewer ways out. It also means you should favour openers built from letters that combine easily with others, which the top of this list does naturally, since high frequency letters are high frequency precisely because they combine well.
A Note On Word Lists And Answers
Guessing games generally allow a much larger set of words as guesses than they will ever use as answers. The allowed list contains obscure entries that would be unfair as solutions. This list is built from a standard English dictionary, so it includes words that a given game may accept as a guess but would never set as an answer. For an opener that is fine, and arguably better, since your first word is there to gather information rather than to be right.
If a word here is rejected outright by the game you are playing, that is a dictionary difference rather than an error. Take the next one down.
The 360 Best Opening Words
Ranked by letter coverage, strongest first. Every word uses five different letters.
Stuck part way through a puzzle?
Use the Word Unscrambler with the starts-with, ends-with and must-include filters to narrow a five letter answer down from the letters you have confirmed.