Users’ Favorite Starting Words
Lately, a particular word game known as Wordle has been all the rage online. If you haven’t heard the good word about Wordle, it’s a game created by and named after puzzle fan Josh Wardle that challenges you to name a particular five-letter word with only six guesses. With each guess, any letter that isn’t in the mystery word is shaded gray, a letter that is in the word (but was guessed in the wrong spot) is shaded yellow, and a correct letter in the right spot is shaded green. Land five greens, and you win!
Find the best words with Word Finder
If you’re STUCK in Wordle, and need a helping NUDGE, you can always rely on Word Finder! This tool—perfect for games like Scrabble™ and Wordle—should be in any word lover’s pocket, when the right word is just out of reach. Turn those yellow and black boxes into a row of green with just one quick search for that elusive 5-letter word.
This simple game has taken the internet by storm, largely due to how addictive it is to play and how easy it is to share your attempts on social media. Wordle can only be played once a day, and it keeps track of your winning streak and scores. Wardle has chalked up the game’s popularity to this once-a-day rule and the ease of sharing game results with friends.
It seems our users can’t get enough of Wordle either as Wordle answers have been among some of our top lookups recently! Some popularly searched Wordle words include knoll, youth, great, and gnome. With that in mind, we wanted to take a moment to share some popular Wordle strategies and a bunch of words that we and our users like to use as go-to moves in pursuit of Wordle success.
Why five letters?
In interviews, Josh Wardle hasn’t said specifically why he chose five letters. However, he and his partner narrowed it down from the “around 12,000” five-letter English words to 2,500 to use as the master list. It’s possible that the five-letter word goal (and Wordle itself) was inspired by the 1980s game show Lingo, which had very similar rules to Wordle.
Brush up on these spelling rules before the next round.
Most common letters in English
The exact numbers vary according to who measures and how, but the 15 most common English letters in order tend to be:
E
T
A
O
I
N
S
R
H
L
D
C
M
F
U
Unsurprisingly, Z, Q, J, and X consistently round out the bottom. As for the letters that begin the most English words, the top five are T, O, A, W, and B. For the end letter, the most common are E, S, T, D, and N.
Most common letters in Wordle
Our Wordle experts (we can call ourselves that, right?) here at Dictionary.com have put together a unique list of the most common letters appearing in Wordle so far (based on past answers).
Most common pairs
Which two letters go well together? According to letterfrequency.org, the 10 most common letter pairs are:
TH
HE
AN
IN
ER
ON
RE
ED
HA