The best starting word for a five-letter word game, by the numbers

Every five-letter guessing game starts the same way: an empty row, six tries, and a decision you make before you know anything. Most people pick an opener once — usually one packed with vowels — and never question it again.

We questioned it, with numbers. The short version: the best openers are everyday words with two vowels and three common consonants, the popular four-vowel openers are two to three times worse, and the opener matters less than what you do with your second guess.

How we measured it

We took 893 common five-letter English words as the possible answers — taken from a word-frequency list, with simple plurals removed, because many games of this kind never use them as answers. Then we tried every one of 6,422 five-letter dictionary words as an opener.

For each opener, we worked out the colour pattern it would show against each possible answer, and grouped the answers that show the same pattern. The average size of the group you land in is the number of answers still possible after your first guess. Smaller is better: it's the size of the haystack you have left to search.

The best openers

Out of 893 possible answers, the strongest everyday openers leave about 22 to 25:

• ORATE — 21.2
• IRATE — 21.5
• RAISE — 22.1
• ARISE — 22.7
• AROSE — 23.1
• CRATE — 24.0
• LATER — 24.2
• TRACE — 24.5
• STARE — 24.9, CRANE — 25.5

A few obscure words squeeze in among these, but there's no need to learn them; the everyday words do the same job. For comparison, the median word in the dictionary leaves about 73 answers. The worst openers — words with repeated or rare letters, like FUZZY — leave more than 400. You learn almost nothing from them.

Every top opener has the same shape: five different letters, two or three vowels from A, E, I and O, and the rest from R, T, L, S, N and C. No U, no repeats, nothing rare.

Why four-vowel openers are worse than they feel

The most common advice is to burn through as many vowels as you can. It sounds logical — almost every word has one. The numbers disagree:

• ADIEU leaves 46.8 answers — about twice as many as ARISE.
• AUDIO leaves 66.9 — about three times as many.

There are two problems. First, you find the vowels anyway. E appears in 51% of the answers and A in 42%, so learning that the word has one tells you less than it seems. Second, a fourth vowel costs you a consonant slot, and the fourth one is usually U. R appears in 39% of answers, T in 31%, L in 27%, S in 26% and N in 25% — while U appears in only 17%. A consonant that splits the answers cleanly beats a vowel you would have found on guess two.

Position matters too. E is the commonest last letter by a distance, ending 20% of the answers, with T and Y next at 11%. That's part of why ARISE, CRATE and TRACE do so well: they put the most common letter where it is most often found.

The opener matters less than you think

Here is the number that surprised us. We gave a computer each opener and let it play every following guess perfectly. Average guesses to solve:

• ARISE — 3.18
• ADIEU — 3.36
• AVOID, a middle-of-the-pack opener — 3.38
• FUZZY — 3.80

A great opener is worth about a fifth of a guess over an average one. That's real — over a hundred games it adds up — but it isn't the difference between good and bad players. The difference is guess two.

After a strong opener you typically have a couple of letters confirmed and a couple of dozen words still possible. The common mistake is to try to be right on guess two, by playing a word that fits everything you know. If more than a handful of answers are still possible, it's usually better to spend guess two on five new common letters — a word that can't be the answer but splits the remaining ones apart. Then guess three can be right.

In a race, use a fixed pair

When you're racing a clock or another player across several words, thinking time costs points. The speed play is a fixed pair: the same two words, in the same order, on every row, chosen to cover ten different letters between them. Three good pairs from our run:

• CRANE, then TOILS
• SLATE, then MINOR
• RAISE, then COUNT

Each pair leaves only about two and a half possible answers on average after both guesses. Played this way, CRANE and TOILS solve in 3.38 guesses on average and never needed more than five — about the same as a well-played vowel opener, with no thinking at all for the first two rows. A careful player beats a fixed pair by about a fifth of a guess per word. A fixed pair beats a careful player who is slow.

Check what the game actually hides

All of this depends on the answer list, so spend a few rounds noticing what turns up. Two things are worth checking:

• Plurals. If the answers are never plurals, an S in the last slot is a wasted letter. Move it, or swap it for another consonant.
• Common or obscure. If the answers are everyday words, never waste a guess on a word you'd be surprised to see as the answer.

The general habits behind this — working from patterns rather than recall — are the same ones that make people good at every word game. We wrote about them in why you lose at word games.

A checklist

1. Open with five different common letters: ARISE, IRATE, CRATE or TRACE.
2. Skip four-vowel openers like ADIEU and AUDIO.
3. Never open with repeated or rare letters.
4. On guess two, split rather than guess if many answers remain.
5. Racing? Use a fixed pair — CRANE then TOILS — and think from guess three.