Find Those Green Squares Fast With These Wordle Starting Words

Step aside, Words With Friends; there's a new game in town. The aptly named Wordle is perfect for word-lovers old and young and has risen to popularity in the past few weeks. The game is simple but challenging and works by allowing a player six guesses to figure out the five-letter word of the day. With each guess, every letter in the submitted word will turn either gray, yellow, or green. If the letter turns gray, it means that letter is not in the word of the day. If it turns yellow, that letter is in the word of the day, but it is in a different position within the five-letter word. If the letter turns green, that means that the letter is correctly placed. Letters can be repeated, which often trips players up, and each submitted word has to be not only a real English word, but also within the official Wordle database.

Because players only have six chances to guess the correct word, it's imperative to be highly strategic, and that strategy starts with your very first guess. One of the most popular strategies is to pick a word with multiple vowels in it for your first word. Some people even use the same start word every day once they find one they like. The trouble is figuring out what word that should be.

So beyond trying to choose a starting word that contains a high number of vowels and commonly used letters, how exactly should you pick? There are a ton of theories. Take TikTok user @linguisticdiscovery, aka Danny Hieber, for example. Hieber's account is dedicated to linguistics, and he believes that the best starting word is "irate" because it contains the three most common vowels and the two most common consonants.

@linguisticdiscovery

Follow me for more word game hacks #Wordle

♬ original sound - Linguistic Discovery

Other players are looking beyond the letters to get a leg up in the game. Computer scientist and TikTok user @crvlwanek, aka Chris Wanek, used coding to find the ideal starting word. Wanek dug through the entire source file of Wordle to view the entire word list. He loaded all of the words into a program that calculated the frequency of each letter, scored each word based on the frequencies of the letters in the word, and then calculated the most optimal starting word with all of that information. His word? "Later."

@crvlwanek

#stitch with @linguisticdiscovery Different method, similar results! #wordle#linguistics#computerscience#python

♬ original sound - Chris

While you can choose to use one of these two genius start words, there are plenty of other first-word options that you can use to make your signature move. It seems that, overall, the name of the Wordle game is simply picking words with more than one vowel alongside consonants that are common.

Below, you can find 150 start words that contain valuable vowels and common consonants: