Wordle Tips: The Best Words To Start With, Hints And Tricks

Wordle tips and tricks:

If your go-to first word on Wordle is one that includes many vowels, it’s bad news. 

“Ideally, you don't want to start with lots of vowels,” Dr Gupta tells us. 

“‘A’, ‘E’, ‘I’, ‘O’ and ‘U’ are very common letters and as such, even if you get a vowel in the right place, it won't narrow down your options as much as you'd like it to.”

They continue: “For example, the letter ‘E’ occurs in the second position in over 1500 words ranging from begot to heard to least to melon. It's going to take a lot of time to work through these, and even longer if you don't know which position E is in!”

The same principle applies to “some frequent consonants like ‘S’”. 

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to use super obscure letters instead, though.

“On the other hand, infrequent letters like Q and Z might also not give you enough information,” they tell us.

“These occur infrequently and are therefore less likely to appear in the word, so you end up using up all your tries without getting a correct letter.”

It’s also important to steer clear of repeated letters, particularly a double ‘L’ or ‘E’ within a word. These “will tell you whether an ‘L’ is present or not… But if that letter isn’t present you’ve missed a chance to see whether a different letter is present”.

What should I start Wordle with?

The best tactic for starting Wordle, in Dr Gupta’s opinion, is to use a word with medium-frequency consonants that “are likely to give you the most information”.

“These help you fill in - or rule out - less common but not really unusual letters and then you can build on these.

“Words containing letters like G, L, M, and R are as good a place to start as any.”

Referring to specific words to start with, they say: “I would be inclined to start with something like ‘Grump’ or ‘Drink’ to get a nice spread of medium frequency consonants.”