OneAnagram

Picking a strong opener

Wordle rewards openers that test common letters without wasting guesses on repeats. English text leans heavily on E, A, R, O, T, L, S, N, and I - so a first word built from five or six of those, each appearing once, tends to eliminate or confirm more than a word chosen for any other reason (including "does this look like a real answer").

Solid, genuinely common five-letter words that fit the bill:

There's no single mathematically "best" opener - that depends on the exact answer list and how you weigh early information against picking words you'd actually recognize as answers. What matters more than the specific word is the habit: cover different common letters on your first two guesses instead of clustering around the same handful.

Reading the clues correctly

Wordle's three colors mean three different things, and mixing them up is the single most common way to waste a guess:

• Green - that letter is correct and in that exact position. Keep it locked there in every future guess.
• Yellow - that letter is in the word, but not in that position. Re-use the letter, just move it.
• Gray - that letter isn't in the word at all unless it also appears elsewhere in your guess as green or yellow - Wordle only grays out a repeated letter once you've accounted for every copy that's actually in the answer.

Narrowing your guesses

The Wordle solver is built for exactly this: five tiles you type your guess into, each one click-cycling gray, yellow, or green. It applies the real rules precisely, including the tricky part most simple tools get wrong - a gray tile for a letter that's already green or yellow elsewhere doesn't mean "banned," it means "no additional copies," which matters whenever a guess has a repeated letter.

It won't solve the puzzle for you - it does the elimination Wordle's own keyboard coloring hints at, just faster and across the full dictionary at once, so you can spend your remaining guesses testing real candidates instead of words you already know are wrong.

Common mistakes

• Guessing the same core letters twice. If your first two guesses already share three or four letters, you're not gathering much new information - favor variety over "reasonable-sounding" words early on.
• Forgetting a gray letter can still be in the word. If a letter appears twice in your guess and only one copy turns green or yellow, the other copy grays out - that doesn't mean the letter is fully excluded, just that it isn't repeated.
• Ignoring letter frequency on later guesses. With three or four unknown letters left, guessing a word that repeats a letter you've already confirmed teaches you less than testing a fresh, common one.

More reading

For letter-scoring strategy on Scrabble and Words With Friends specifically, see the strategy guide & FAQ.