The Best 6-Letter Wordle Starting Words, Measured (Plus 7 and 8 Letters)

Every guide to the five-letter game agrees on roughly the same handful of openers, and in our first article we measured why. The six-letter versions get no such treatment. Thousands of people use our 6-letter solver every month, and one of the questions that brings them there most often is the simplest one: what should the first guess be?

Nobody has scored it properly, for one good reason: there is no official six-letter answer list. The daily five-letter game draws from a known vocabulary. The longer games are variants, each with its own word list, so any ranking depends on assumptions about the answers. We made those assumptions explicit, ran the full calculation, and then checked how much the ranking moves when the assumptions change. The short answer: less than you would think, except for one question that matters a lot.

What we scored

The method is the same as in the first article. A guess is only as good as the feedback it produces, so for every candidate opener we computed the exact colour pattern against every possible answer, counted how many answers land on each pattern, and turned that into three numbers:

• Information, in bits. How much the guess narrows the field on average. Each extra bit halves the candidates you still have to consider.
• Average candidates left. After the first guess, how many answers remain compatible with what the board shows, weighted by how likely each pattern is.
• Largest remaining group. The worst case: the biggest set of answers that share one pattern.

Feedback follows the standard rule that greens are allocated before yellows, with each letter of the answer used at most once, so repeated letters are handled correctly. We ran two independently written scoring routines and required them to agree on every published pair.

Unlike the first article, this one is not a comparison of a few hand-picked words. Every qualifying word of each length was scored as a potential opener: 9,056 six-letter words, 11,011 seven-letter words and 11,074 eight-letter words.

The vocabulary problem, and how we handled it

A word qualified when it appears both in our own English dictionary (so it is a real, defined word) and in the word-frequency data behind our solvers. We ordered those words from most common to least common and cut answer pools of three sizes: the 1,500, 3,000 and 6,000 most common words of each length. The 3,000-word pool is the headline; the other two exist to show whether the answer depends on where you draw the line.

Then there is the question no five-letter guide has to ask. The daily game avoids plain plurals: an answer is never just a noun with an S on the end. Six-letter variants are not consistent about this. Some lists are full of plurals, some strip them. Because a final S is a very common way to make a six-letter word, the rule changes which openers win. So we scored a fourth pool: the 3,000 most common words with plain plurals removed (any word ending in S whose singular is also a word).

Every answer in a pool received equal weight. This is a retrospective ranking of first guesses on a fixed vocabulary, not a full decision tree and not a measurement of how our users actually play.

6 letters: the ranking

Against the 3,000 most common six-letter words, plurals included:

Source: WordleSolver Pro's original calculation on the frozen vocabulary snapshot. "Candidates left" counts the compatible answer itself, including a one-word group when the guess is correct.

The top of the table is the same cast as the five-letter game, one letter longer: A, E, I with R, S, T, and the occasional C or L. The maximum possible is 11.55 bits (that would identify one answer in 3,000 outright), and the best openers deliver about 7.5 of them, leaving roughly 25 candidates on average.

Three things stand out.

The best scorers are not words you would play. ARTIES, CARIES and PARIES are dictionary words, but they are obscure, and two of them are plurals of words most people have never used. They win by packing the six most useful letters into positions that occur often. If you are happy to open with a word you do not know, ARTIES is the measured answer.

SATIRE and SALTER are the practical choice. SATIRE is fourth overall and the best opener that is itself a common word, so it could also be the answer. SALTER is third. The gap between third and first is 0.02 bits, which is nothing. Pick whichever you will remember.

S at the end is doing a lot of work. Six of the top ten end in S. With plurals in the pool, a final S is close to a free letter: it is either green immediately or it tells you the answer is not a plural, and both are worth knowing.

What if the game does not use plurals?

Remove the plain plurals from the answer pool and the picture rearranges:

SALTER moves to first, SATIRE stays second, and the plural-shaped winners fall to the back half of the top ten. ARTIES drops from first to tenth. Only six of the ten words survive the change, and across the top 200 the two rankings agree only loosely (a rank correlation of 0.48).

Compare that with what happens when you change the size of the answer list instead. Going from 1,500 to 3,000 to 6,000 common words, nine of the top ten stay the same and the rank correlation across the top 200 is 0.87 to 0.95. The ranking is stable in the dimension people worry about (how big the answer list is) and unstable in the one they do not think about (whether plurals count).

So the one thing worth finding out about the six-letter game you play is whether it uses plurals. If it does, or you do not know, SATIRE and SALTER score well either way. If it clearly does not, SALTER is the pick, with CANTER and SANDER as everyday alternatives.

The popular picks, checked

A few openers people commonly try, plus two controls, with their rank among all 9,056 qualifying words:

RAISED is a fine opener under both rules, about 0.36 bits behind the leader, which works out to 31.7 candidates left instead of 25.3. TRAINS is good only if plurals are in play; without them it slides to 154th because its S stops being informative. ORIENT, a favourite in vowel-heavy strategies, sits outside the top 350 under both rules: it spends a slot on a third vowel, and letters such as S and L would have told you more. FUZZED is there as the control, and it does its job.

7 letters

Seven-letter words have a clear winner, and it does not care which pool you use:

SALTIER is first in all four pools, plurals or not. Without plurals, the rest of the top five is SALTIRE, SALTINE, NASTIER and SARDINE. NASTIER is the pick if you want a word everyone knows: it is eighth with plurals and fourth without, within 0.2 bits of the top in both. RETAINS is a strong fourth when plurals are allowed but slips to ninth without them, for the same reason TRAINS does at six letters.

8 letters

NOTARIES leads with plurals allowed and stays third without them. The no-plural leader is a name that slipped into the vocabulary through the dictionary, so we do not recommend it; CANISTER, second on that list and fourth on this one, is the everyday word to remember. COSTLIER is the other ordinary word inside the top seven under both rules, and DOCTRINE is fourth once plurals are gone.

Longer words, faster games

The most interesting result is not any single word. It is how much more a first guess achieves as words get longer:

An eight-letter opener eliminates all but a handful of candidates on average, and the chance of an all-grey first row is below one in two hundred for every opener in the eight-letter top ten, and below one in a thousand for the leader. Six letters is closer to the five-letter game: a couple of dozen candidates left, and about a one-in-a-hundred chance of no colour at all for the leading openers. That is why the long variants feel easier despite the longer words: the first guess does most of the work, and the puzzle is mostly about reading the board afterwards.

How to use this

Pick one opener per length and stop thinking about it. Our suggestions, in order of how sure we are:

• 6 letters: SATIRE if you want a common word, SALTER if the game avoids plurals, ARTIES if you only care about the number.
• 7 letters: SALTIER, or NASTIER if you prefer a familiar word.
• 8 letters: NOTARIES, or CANISTER as the everyday alternative.

After the first row, let the colours decide. A fixed second word wastes turns at these lengths because the first guess already leaves so little. Enter the board into the 6-letter, 7-letter or 8-letter solver and it will list what remains, ordered by how common each word is.

Method and limits

The vocabulary snapshot was frozen on September 18, 2026: qualifying words are those present in both our dictionary and our frequency tiers, ordered by frequency, with pools of the top 1,500, 3,000 and 6,000 and a plural-free pool of 3,000. Every qualifying word was scored as an opener against every pool with exact feedback and a uniform prior. The published rows are recomputed with two independent implementations every time the site is built, and the build fails if any number moves.

What this cannot tell you: which variant you are playing uses which list. Our frequency data comes from general English usage, so the pools contain some words a game designer would never pick, including a few names, and they miss any house rules a particular game applies. The ranking is a first-guess ranking only. It says nothing about the best second guess, and nothing about how real players perform, which would need real boards rather than a calculation.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best 6-letter Wordle starting word?

Measured against the 3,000 most common six-letter words, ARTIES scores highest, with CARIES, SALTER and SATIRE within 0.07 bits of it. SATIRE is the best opener that is also a common word, and SALTER is the best choice if the game does not use plurals.

Does the answer change with a different word list?

Not much. Across answer pools of 1,500, 3,000 and 6,000 common words, nine of the top ten openers stay the same. What changes the ranking is whether plain plurals can be answers: with plurals removed, SALTER leads and plural-shaped openers such as ARTIES and CRATES drop down the list.

What is the best 7-letter starting word?

SALTIER, which comes first in every pool we tested. NASTIER is the strongest everyday word, within 0.2 bits of it.

What is the best 8-letter starting word?

NOTARIES scores highest when plurals are allowed and third when they are not. CANISTER is the strongest common word under both rules.

Is a vowel-heavy opener like ORIENT a good idea?

No. ORIENT ranks outside the top 400 six-letter openers under both rules. Letters such as S, T, R and L narrow the field more than a third vowel does, exactly as in the five-letter game.