Best Starter Words in Wordle – Consonants, Vowels, & More!

There are thousands of possibilities of five-letter words, so it’s critical to have a game plan that helps you knock out some commonly used letters to see if they are in your solution with your first few guesses. The most commonly used letters in the English language are: e, a, r, i, o, t, n, s, l, c. This means that your first word should try to include some of these letters since there’s a good chance at least one, if not more, will show up in the Wordle of the day.

If you just want to find the solutions to each daily puzzles, be sure to check out our Wordle Answers post!

Wordle Starter Words

These are the best starter words to use in Wordle to maximize a mix of unique vowels and consonants that are commonly used in five-letter words, but they also take advantage of considering the eligible words for Wordle itself as Wordle’s solutions have a more limited list compared to the list of words it accepts as guesses.

Best Wordle Starter Words

• actor
• arson
• coral
• earns
• easel
• irate
• leant
• ocean
• patio
• raise
• riots
• roast
• saint
• satin
• shear
• solar
• snort
• stare
• stern
• stone
• trail

Wordle Starter Words with Vowels

Some people believe that the best words to use to kick off your Wordle guesses is to max out on the vowels. It can really depend on the words that tend to come to your mind and your playing style, so here are 10 vowel-packed starter words:

• adieu
• audio
• auloi
• aurei
• louie
• miaou
• ouija
• ourie
• uraei

Wordle Starter Words with Consonants

On the other hand, many of the most commonly used letters in the English language are consonants, so using a mix of vowels and consonants can actually be more effective at getting information in one word that leads to a better secondary guess.

• adept
• clamp
• clasp
• depot
• print
• recap
• scalp
• slate
• strap
• tramp

How to Pick a Good Starter Word in Wordle

We recommend using five unique letters to maximize finding letters that are actually in the Wordle of the day. Next, we think that using a mix of vowels and consonants to be better than going all in on one or the other. Again, the most commonly used letters in the English language, in order of most common, are: e, a, r, i, o, t, n, s, l, c.

This means that any starter word you use should be prioritizing these letters. For vowels, that means E and A and for consonants, R and T. Some additional letters to consider: I, O, N. This is why a word like STARE or IRATE are commonly recommended as starter words to use.

If your first starter word yields poor results, which means that it doesn’t contain some of the most commonly used letters in the English language, make sure your second guess uses the remaining commonly used letters, such as LOINS or CLONS.

Words to Avoid as Wordle Starter Words

The five least used letters in the English language are: Q, J, Z, X, and V. Words with these letters are better used if you find that you’ve already eliminated most commonly used letters already. You want to avoid words that focus on these types of letters because they are unlikely to be used in any given Wordle solution.

Next, you want to maximize the unique letters in your starter word, which means you want to avoid repeated letters, whether that means they are next to each other (like snoop) or mixed in the word (like aroma).

That’s just about everything you’d want to know on the best starter words for the game. You can find a bunch of great related content in the Wordle section of our website!