The weakest Wordle openers in common use are the vowel-heavy ones, and they have been recommended for years. ADIEU leaves you with roughly twice as many possible answers as RAISE. AUDIO leaves three times as many. OUIJA leaves four times as many, and we know that one well, because our own blog recommended it until this week.
Below are the openers that cost you the most, measured rather than asserted, along with the letters worth keeping out of guess one entirely.
How we ranked the openers
We took the original Wordle answer list of 2,315 words and the full allowed-guess list of 12,972 words, both public since the game launched. English letter frequencies throughout come from Peter Norvig’s analysis of 743 billion words of Google Books text. For every legal guess, we played it against all 2,315 answers, grouped the answers by the colour pattern the guess returns, and measured how large a pool the average player would be left staring at.
That number is the one we report throughout: possible answers still standing after guess one. Lower is better. It is the plain-English version of the information-theoretic approach Grant Sanderson set out in his Wordle analysis, expressed as words remaining rather than bits of entropy, because nobody plays Wordle in bits.
Two caveats worth stating. The 2,315-word list is the one the game shipped with and the one every public analysis uses; The New York Times has made small edits since taking the game over. And a starting word is only the first of six guesses, so a weak opener costs you position rather than the game.
The popular openers that cost you the most
Every word in this table is a legal guess and a real English word.
| Opener | Answers still standing | Compared with RAISE |
|---|---|---|
| RAISE | 61 | baseline |
| SLATE | 72 | 1.2x |
| CRANE | 79 | 1.3x |
| ADIEU | 124 | 2.0x |
| STORY | 134 | 2.2x |
| PIANO | 135 | 2.2x |
| MEDIA | 153 | 2.5x |
| ABOUT | 167 | 2.7x |
| PIOUS | 179 | 2.9x |
| AUDIO | 184 | 3.0x |
| LIGHT | 204 | 3.3x |
| OUIJA | 246 | 4.0x |
Expected size of the remaining answer pool, averaged across all 2,315 answers. The Word Finder, September 2026.
LIGHT deserves a particular mention. It comes back entirely grey 23% of the time, the worst rate of any common opener we tested, because I, G, H and T cluster in the same kinds of words. When it misses, it misses completely.
Why stacking vowels backfires
The reasoning behind ADIEU and AUDIO is intuitive: every answer needs a vowel, so find the vowels first. ADIEU has the added appeal of looking clever, a French borrowing English never bothered to translate. The arithmetic does not support it.
Only nine legal Wordle guesses contain four different vowels. The best of them, URAEI, leaves 81 answers standing, and 563 other legal guesses beat it. ADIEU manages 124, AUDIO 184, OUIJA 246. The problem is what a fifth slot spent on U costs you. U turns up in 19.7% of answers. R turns up in 36.2%, T in 28.8%, S in 26.7%, L in 28.0%. Buying a fourth vowel means selling a consonant that would have told you more.
RAISE gets this right and is worth studying for it. It carries three vowels, which is plenty, and spends its two remaining slots on R and S. Adding one more vowel to a word like that has never once improved it.
The everyday words that do the most damage
These are all in Wordle’s answer list, so they are words a normal person might reasonably type on a Monday morning. They are also close to the worst guesses available in the entire game.
- FUZZY leaves 856 answers standing and returns all grey 58% of the time
- JAZZY leaves 702, all grey 48% of the time
- MUMMY leaves 821, all grey 57% of the time
- MAMMA leaves 778
- FIZZY leaves 728
- JIFFY leaves 735
- VIVID leaves 815
- PUPPY leaves 778
- FLUFF leaves 723
FUZZY beats only 0.1% of the 12,972 legal guesses. Playing it as an opener costs you roughly fourteen times the ground RAISE covers.
The shared fault is repetition. Across every legal guess, words with a repeated letter average 3.99 bits of information against 4.69 for words with five different letters. A repeated letter is a slot you have paid for and declined to use.
The single worst legal guess in Wordle
QAJAQ, a variant spelling of kayak and a legal word in the Collins Scrabble word list, leaves 925 of the 2,315 answers standing and comes back completely grey 59% of the time. It is the weakest legal opener in the game, roughly fifteen times worse than RAISE.
The rest of the bottom ten, for completeness: JUJUS, IMMIX, XYLYL, YUKKY, PZAZZ, JAFFA, FUFFY, KUDZU and GYPPY. Nobody is playing these seriously. They are useful as a floor, because they show what the metric looks like when a word does everything wrong at once: rare letters, repeated letters, and no positional information.
The five letters to keep out of your opener
Measured against the answer list rather than against English prose, the rarest letters are stark:
- J appears in 1.2% of answers
- Q appears in 1.3%
- Z appears in 1.5%
- X appears in 1.6%
- V appears in 6.4%
Compare those with E at 45.6%, A at 39.3% and R at 36.2%. The 289 legal guesses containing a J average 3.73 bits; the best of them, RAJES, still falls outside the top 400 openers. A J, Q, X or Z in your opening word is a slot spent testing a scenario that will almost never be true.
One frequently mangled follow-on: the letter Y. Y is uncommon inside words but it ends 15.7% of Wordle answers, second only to E at 18.3%. Worth testing, and worth testing late rather than first.
What to play instead
The short version: pick a five-distinct-letter word carrying three vowels and two of R, S, T, L, N, then play it every day until you can read the tile patterns without thinking. RAISE, SLATE, CRANE, IRATE, ARISE and STARE all clear that bar, and any of them will serve you better on the daily puzzle than the vowel-stacking alternatives. The full ranking and the reasoning behind the top openers sits in our companion post.
If you play the variants, the arithmetic shifts with the word length, and our guide to starting words for 4-, 6- and 7-letter Lingle covers those separately.
When a puzzle turns on you regardless of how you opened, the Wordle Solver will narrow the field from the greens, yellows and greys you already have. For pattern practice, the archive of past Wordle answers shows what the game actually asks for, and our analysis of the hardest Wordles so far covers the days when no opener would have saved you. Unlimited practice rounds live on Lingle.
Methodology
We used the original Wordle answer list (2,315 words) and the allowed-guess list (12,972 words), both public. For each of the 12,972 legal guesses we computed the feedback pattern against all 2,315 answers, grouped answers by pattern, and report the expected size of the surviving pool. Letter coverage percentages are the share of the 2,315 answers containing that letter. English letter frequencies are from Peter Norvig's analysis of 743 billion words of Google Books text. Figures computed 15 September 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What is the worst Wordle starting word?
QAJAQ, a variant spelling of kayak, is the weakest legal opener in the game. It leaves 925 of the 2,315 possible answers standing and returns no colour at all 59% of the time. Among words people actually play, FUZZY is the worst, leaving 856 answers standing.
Is ADIEU a bad Wordle starting word?
ADIEU is weaker than its reputation suggests. It leaves around 124 possible answers standing, roughly twice as many as RAISE, because the fifth slot spent on U buys less than a common consonant would. It is not a disaster, and it sits ahead of AUDIO and OUIJA, but it is not a top-tier opener.
Why are vowel-heavy words bad Wordle openers?
Only nine legal Wordle guesses contain four different vowels, and 563 other guesses outperform the best of them. U appears in 19.7% of answers while R appears in 36.2%, so a slot spent on a fourth vowel is a slot not spent on a letter that would eliminate more words.
Which letters should you avoid in a Wordle starting word?
J, Q, Z and X each appear in under 2% of Wordle answers, and V in 6.4%. Any opener containing one is testing a scenario that is almost never true. Build your first guess from E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S and N instead.
Does a repeated letter make a Wordle opener worse?
Yes, measurably. Across all 12,972 legal guesses, words with a repeated letter average 3.99 bits of information compared with 4.69 for words with five different letters. FUZZY, MUMMY and PUPPY are all in the bottom 0.3% of openers largely for this reason.
What is the best Wordle starting word?
Measured against the answer list, SOARE, ROATE and RAISE lead the field, each leaving around 61 answers standing. RAISE is the one most people will actually remember, which matters more than the third decimal place.
