Standard advice for five-letter word puzzles ranks starting words by letter frequency across all of English. Our Word Guess game ships with a fixed 200-word answer bank, and we measured it. The bank disagrees with the standard advice in one important way, and the correct opening move here is different from the one most guides recommend.
The Bank Behind the Game
The engine selects each answer uniformly at random from a list of 200 five-letter words, from CRANE at the top of the list to FRESH at the bottom. The accepted guess list adds about 300 more literal entries, one of which, AWFUL, is listed twice, for 499 unique accepted guesses in total.
Guesses are validated against that list only. Submit five letters that are not on it and the row shakes and shows not in word list. Two rare letters each appear in exactly one answer, J in ENJOY and Q in EQUAL, and X appears in two, EXACT and EXTRA. Guessing J or Q words to gather information is close to worthless here.
Letter Frequencies Measured From the Bank
Counting how many of the 200 answers contain each letter at least once gives the table the strategy should be built on.
E 99 A 90 R 86 C 74 L 70 D 59
O 50 B 47 N 44 T 44 F 42 I 40
S 39 H 36 U 28 K 22 M 19 G 17
The surprise is S. Across English five-letter words S is a top letter. In this bank it appears in only 39 of 200 answers, behind F and barely ahead of H. Meanwhile C appears in 74 answers and starts 59 of them, more than any other first letter.
Why CEDAR Beats SLATE Here
Score an opening word by summing the presence counts of its distinct letters and the bank's ranking inverts the conventional advice.
1. CEDAR scores 408, the highest of any accepted guess.
2. CRANE and TRACE score 393.
3. ALERT scores 389 and CABLE scores 380.
4. SLATE, the classic recommendation, scores 342, because its S buys only 39 answers.
CEDAR wins because it stacks the bank's five most present letters, C, E, D, A, R, with no repeats. CRANE runs a close second and doubles as the first word in the answer list, which is fitting.
For vowel coverage, AUDIO is the only accepted guess containing four distinct vowels, scoring 267. Treat it as a diagnostic second guess when your opener returns all gray.
Second Guess Rules
Apply these in order.
1. If your opener returned all gray, guess from the next tier of letters, D, O, B, N, or use AUDIO to sweep four vowels at once.
2. If you have one green consonant and no vowel information, guess a word combining E or A with two untested consonants from the table's top rows.
3. If two vowels are already placed, spend the next guess entirely on consonants from the C, R, L, D, B rows.
4. If four or more candidates remain and you cannot split them with a plausible word, burn a guess that tests one letter from each candidate. The engine has no hard mode, so elimination guesses are always legal.
The last rule matters. Validation checks list membership only, so you may submit any accepted word at any time, including one that ignores your confirmed greens.
Duplicate Letters and the Two-Pass Evaluator
The color logic runs two passes. Pass one marks greens, exact position matches, and consumes those target slots. Pass two marks yellows only for target letters not already consumed. The consequence for repeated letters is precise.
If the answer contains one R and you guess two, the first R takes yellow or green and the second shows gray. Treat a gray repeat as evidence the letter appears exactly once, not zero times, when another copy of it already colored. In this bank 42 of 200 answers contain a repeated letter and 18 contain adjacent doubles, including APPLE, BLEED, and BLOOD. Once your candidate set narrows, check which candidates could repeat a letter.
Keyboard Facts You Can Exploit
The on-screen keyboard tracks letter states with a fixed precedence, green over yellow over gray, and states never downgrade. A letter that was yellow stays yellow even if a later guess grays it out, because the engine keeps the strongest result.
Input locks while a row reveals. The flip animation runs 0.5 seconds per tile with a 0.15 second stagger, so a full row finishes revealing 1.1 seconds after you press enter. Rapid typists lose keystrokes during that window, so watch the row finish before typing the next guess.
Stats and Session Behavior
Statistics persist in localStorage under wordle_stats, holding games played, games won, current streak, max streak, and a six-slot guess distribution. The win percentage is rounded to a whole number on display. Wins on the first row through the sixth show the messages Genius, Magnificent, Impressive, Splendid, Great, and Phew.
There is no daily limit. New Game clears the board and picks a fresh random answer from the same 200 words, so you can drill the bank directly. Clearing site data resets every statistic, since nothing is stored server side.
Checklist
- [ ] You open with CEDAR or CRANE instead of SLATE.
- [ ] You stopped guessing J and Q words, they cover one answer each.
- [ ] You read gray repeats correctly, once, not zero times.
- [ ] You use AUDIO as the all-gray fallback.
- [ ] You burn elimination guesses freely, hard mode does not exist here.
- [ ] You waited out the 1.1 second reveal before typing.
Practice the bank-tuned opening on our [Word Guess page](/en/wordle). If you track your own guess distributions and a different opener beats CEDAR for you, send us the numbers, the bank is fixed and the comparison is fair.
