The Best Wordle Starting Word Has Been Figured Out With (Computer) Science

Everyone’s got their go-to starting word to kick off their daily Wordle challenge–for some reason ‘Pssst’ and ‘Myrrh’ always eat up my chances at victory–but the best word to use is later according to Tiktok user Crvlwanek.

In a response to another user claiming that the best starting word is irate, Crvlwanek decided to put that theory to the test by going through Wordle’s entire word list and creating a custom script program to use frequency analysis on each letter. Each word was also scored on the frequency of each letter and then an optimal starting word was chosen from the data.

From that research, ‘later’ rose to the top and it’s not hard to see why. With two vowels and three consonants in its construction, it goes through some of the most commonly-used letters in the alphabet and clues you in what the word of the day is without you having to slyly browse the Free Dictionary website.

In case you were wondering, the worst starting word to use is Xylyl according to Crvlwanek’s research.

Wordle has been a fun distraction since its popularity rose this year. It’s challenging without ever feeling unfair and each brain-teaser is educational. At least one person who hates fun has managed to program an anti-Wordle bot that targets anyone who posts their daily results on Twitter, but its reign of linguistic terror was short-lived after Twitter banned it.

In more heartwarming news, a developer with an unrelated Wordle app has donated his recent windfall on the Apple App Store to charity after he saw a spike in downloads.

If you’d like some more options for great five-letter words to add to your vocabulary, we’ve got a feature on the best starting words to use in Wordle.