Common Wordle start word is the ‘worst’ — what NYT says you should use instead

For many people, the day doesn’t officially start until they’ve completed the latest Wordle. As fans of the New York Times’ beloved daily word puzzle will know, each day you get six attempts to guess a five-letter word, meaning choosing a good first word is vital.

Many Wordle players have their own strategies, with some opting for the same start word every single day and others preferring to change it up. But despite there being thousands of words in the English language, there still tends to be a lot of overlap in people’s opening guesses. According to the NYT’s previous analysis of 515 million Wordle games, ADIEU is the most common opening word, with 6% of all players opting for it.

Other commonly used starting words at the time were STARE at 4.9%, SLATE at 3.9%, AUDIO at 3.6% and RAISE at 3.1%.

But despite ADIEU featuring four vowels, it turns out using it as an opening word is actually a mistake.

One Wordle player, @yourdailywritingprompt, proposed their theory on TikTok, explaining: “My Wordle hot take is that vowels do not matter. Who cares about vowels, people are too concerned with vowels.

“ADIEU is a terrible starter word. You wanna figure out your consonants. You’re going to get a couple of vowels if you start with a really consonant-heavy word.

“You’re going to get a vowel in the first guess and in the second guess and then you can figure it out.”

They continued: “There’s only five vowels. Who cares? You’re going to figure it out.

“But the consonants. If you know vowels are but you still have 20 consonants to figure out, you’re not in good shape. ADIEU sucks, it’s a terrible starter word.”

The NYT agrees, explaining: “On average, players who started with ADIEU needed about a third of a turn more to solve their Wordles compared with players who started with SLATE, adding up to 132 extra turns over the course of a year.”

They suggest using TRACE, and have also previously recommended SLATE.