Open With a Proven Word — Then Stop Thinking About It
Your first guess is the only one you can optimize in advance, so optimize it once and move on. Against every real answer ever played, STARE hits an average of 1.79 letters per game with the best green rate in its tier.
Prefer alternatives? LATER, ALERT and IRATE edge it slightly on raw coverage. The one thing the data is unambiguous about: vowel-dump openers like ADIEU underperform badly (#217 of all starters). The full ranking is on our best starting words page.
Make Your Second Guess Do Real Work
The most common intermediate-player mistake is chasing one yellow letter with guess two. Unless your opener landed 3+ hits, a second guess with five completely new letters almost always tells you more. The strongest fixed pair we've measured is LATER → SONIC: together they touch at least one letter in 99.3% of all real answers, and three or more letters in 76%.
From guess three onward, switch modes: now you solve, using everything you've learned.
Think in Frequencies, Not Hunches
When choosing between candidate words, prefer the one built from common letters and common positions. The workhorse facts, from all 1,826 answers: E appears in 47% of answers and ends nearly one in five; A (40%) and R (36%) are next; 15% of answers start with S; and Y — mediocre overall — is secretly the second-best final letter (14%). Meanwhile J, Q, Z and X combined appear in under 7% of answers: never spend a scarce guess on them without evidence. More of these on the stats & facts page.
Respect the Repeated Letter
The tell: when several yellows/greens are placed but every candidate you try feels "used up," start doubling. LL, OO and EE are the most common pairs, and 13 answers have even used a letter three times (ERROR, GEESE, PUPPY…).
Never Guess a Plural
Only 1.5% of answers end in S — and essentially none of those are simple plurals (they're words like CHAOS and FOCUS). An S in the fifth slot on a hunch is close to a wasted guess. The same caution applies to -ED and -ER verb forms padded out to five letters.
Escape Word-Family Traps With One Probe
Four greens and a blank first letter is the classic streak-killer. Land on _ATCH and there are still seven real possibilities: BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCH, WATCH — more remaining candidates than remaining guesses.
-IGHT, -OUND and -OWER are the other big families to watch for.
Use the One Clue Nobody Else Has
Wordle occasionally repeats an old answer. Our homepage tells you — spoiler-free — whether today's word has been played before. If it has, the answer is sitting somewhere in the list you're looking at. On the days nothing works, the daily hint page reveals clues one at a time, gentlest first — or let the spoiler-smart Wordle Helper apply that played-before knowledge to your exact board automatically.