Here Are the Letters to Never, Ever Guess in Wordle (and the Ones to Guess Every Day)

Wordle, I love you, and I hate you. I’ve fallen into a groove of guessing the same words over and over when I play Wordle. I like to start with TRAIN, then move on to CLOSE, then DUMPY and sometimes after that, the weird word WHELK. I picked these words strategically because I know which letters are more popular than others.

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In order to get the absolute best starter words, you should know which letters turn up the most in English. I reached out to the big brains at the Oxford English Dictionary — you know, the whopping, multi-volume dictionary that no one actually owns, but that your school librarian adored. An OED representative sent me a list in which staff analyzed all of the main entries in the concise version of the dictionary.

“It’s worth noting that the piece is pretty old,” the OED representative said apologetically. “It mentions that the stats are from Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2004, although current colleagues aren’t sure when the piece itself was written, and I’m afraid we don’t have any newer analysis of this sort.”

The list may be 22 years old, but I’m going with it. The alphabet isn’t like ice cream flavors or musical acts — no new, trendy letters have been introduced in that time. So whether you’re just getting into Wordle, or you want to shake up your starter words and make sure they’re still hitting the most common letters, this list is for you.

S begins the most English words

The most common letter is no surprise to most people: It’s E, and it’s immediately followed by another vowel, A. And those letters are much, much more popular than the final two letters in the OED’s list, which are J and Q. (Anyone else surprised that J is used less than X and Z?)

“The letter E is over 56 times more common than Q in forming individual English words,” the OED analysis found.

It notes that “there are more English words beginning with the letter S than with any other letter.”

So Wordle players, bookmark this article, and you might find yourself doing a little better in upcoming games. Here are the letters of the alphabet ranked according to how frequently they showed up in the 2004 Concise Oxford English Dictionary.