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The best Wordle starting words, tips, and tricks for beginners

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Woman playing Wordle on her smartphone.
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Wordle is a worldwide phenomenon, and though it’s no longer quite the obsession it was in 2022, it’s still a daily delight of many people’s mornings. Wordle‘s genius is that it is simple to understand but fiendishly difficult to master, and anyone can pick it up and start playing in a very brief time. You can learn to play Wordle easily as all you need to do is guess a particular five letter word, but getting it right every time is hard as there are only six attempts to guess the word each day. If you’re struggling to master this tricky puzzle, then try out our tips for the best starting words to maximize your chances of becoming a Wordle master.

How to play Wordle

If you’re brand new to this world of Wordle, here’s a brief rundown of how the game works. Every day, a new five-letter world is chosen that is the same for everyone playing that day. Your challenge is to type in five-letter words to try and figure out what the day’s word is. Every letter in the word you guess will be given a color: Green means you guessed the correct letter, and it is in the correct spot; yellow means that letter is in the answer but not in the right spot; and gray letters are not in the word at all. Each guess must be a dictionary word, so you can’t just throw in five random letters.

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Since everyone playing gets the same word each day, when the game prompts you to share your results, it will only show the colors of how you did in a grid so no one is spoiled on the day’s word. The faster you guess the entire word, the more impressive!

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Best Wordle starting words, and tips to win

Someone playing Wordle on a smartphone.
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It might seem like Wordle is all luck, but there are a few good practices you can use to help get as many clues as possible in just a few guesses, making it that much more likely you can figure out the final word before you run out of tries.

The most important guess is your first. You want to get as many green and yellow letters here as possible to help guide your future guesses. The most important letters to get started with are vowels — A, E, I, O, and U — so words containing as many of these as possible are a great start. Some popular starting words people have had good luck with are “adieu,” “media,” “arise,” and “radio.” Just make sure not to pick a word with double letters, to get as much new info as possible.

Your second word, assuming that the first one gave you a good jumping-off point, should begin to lean more heavily on common consonants like R, S, and T. More good ones here we’ve seen are “stern,” “irate,” and “atone.” This is where things will vary due to each day being a different solution, but you never want to reuse any letters from a prior round that showed up as gray. It may push you to think a little harder to come up with a word, but there’s nothing to be gained from using a letter you know isn’t in the answer.

Finally, keep in mind that words can have a duplicate letter. These words are the toughest to get, but also aren’t super common. If you get to the final round or two and are stumped, it’s a great thing to keep in mind.

The New York Times, which operates Wordle, made a sizable change to the way the game works in November 2022. A dedicated editor is now in charge of the game, and will potentially make changes to the solutions list to liven things up. Most notably, plural words that simply add an “es” or “s” to a singular word will not be valid answers anymore; for example “boats” and “foxes” cannot be a Wordle answer anymore. Other plurals like “fungi” or “geese” will still be valid. Crucially, all five-letter dictionary words are still valid to guess and get yellow or green letters from, but that doesn’t mean they’re available as a future solution.

Tools that can help you with Wordle

A person plays 'Wordle' on an iPhone.
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Some people think that the fun of Wordle is coming up with word ideas on your own, but others find that some tools help them enjoy the puzzle more. If you’re tool-inclined, then you can try a list of five-letter words like the Best Word List to help you come up with ideas. A warning though, as these kinds of word databases tend to include a lot of words which aren’t well known and which likely wouldn’t be accepted by Wordle. Still, if you’re really stumped then it could help give you some clues as for words to try.

If you need even more help than that, there are tools like Wordle Solver which will take your green and yellow letters from your guesses and give you the likely answer. That rather takes the fun out of playing the game, but the developers of the tool say it’s designed to help you maintain your streak when you’re really stuck on a single puzzle — so if that’s important to you, can can try this tool out.

Other than these tips, the most important thing is to have fun with it! Wordle is meant to be a fun little brain-teaser, not something to get stressed out over. Enjoy the ride, learn some new words, and start posting your own grids all over social media to show off with everyone else! And if you’re stuck, here’s today’s Wordle answer.

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