The Best Opening Wordle Word might be SOARE, or SALET, or something else
This is a follow-up to my article: The Best Opening Wordle Word is SAINE. Read that article to find out more about the methodology.
In that previous article, I explained how I iterated over all the possible solution words for Wordle (2,315 words) and scored letters based on their frequency and then scored the letter frequency per position. For example, “E” is the most common letter and is also the most frequently part of the last two letters of words.
I’d previously declared SAINE as the best word by ranking all the playable words by adding up their letter values (position frequency). I call this the word’s score.
SAINE’s score = 366 + 304 + 266 + 182 + 424 = 1542
The Case For SOARE
However, I got a suggestion to include the overall score with the position frequency score which results in SOARE being the top-ranked word.
SOARE = (669 + 754 + 979 + 899 + 1233) + (366 +279 + 307 + 152 + 424) = 6062
SAINE ranks #16 with 5669.
Weighting the positional frequency score and the overall frequency score on a 1-to-1 basis is arbitrary. But to support the argument for SOARE, I’d point out that when the overall frequency is weighted at half of the positional frequency, SOARE is still #1 and remains so even when you weigh positional frequency at 5x the value of overall frequency.
A few other coders around the interwebs also found, using their own methods, that SOARE is the best word to start Wordle with. It’s not a consensus, but SOARE keeps popping up.
Matt Rickard, a former Google engineer, found SOARE by comparing all the possible guesses and ranking them by how many possibilities the words left. SOARE eliminates all but an average of 219 of the 2,315 solutions. A completely different approach, same result.
The Case for SALET
Roaming around on r/wordle, I found some claims that SALET had been proven to be the best opening word for Wordle… and several bots agreed.
When a Wordle solving bot starts with the word SALET, it solves in an average of 3.4212 rows. As far as I can tell, SALET was found by brute-forcing all of the playable words and not by a ranking type algorithm as I made.
Arguably, bots don’t play how humans do and I don’t think anyone is trying to argue that SALET is the best opening word for humans.
To be fair (IMO) to my earlier assertion, SAINE solves in an average of 3.4666 rows… so not much different than the leader. SOARE averaged 3.4614
The Case for Something Else
Some people are suggestion that ADIEU is the ultimate first word.
That’s FOUR VOWELS. FOUR! You’ll immediately have a clear picture of which of the five are either in or out. (https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/wordle-strategy-first-word-best-adieu)
ADIEU might be more friendly to how humans play but I have no way to measure that. So who knows?
What is your favorite starting word?
