The best starting words for a five-letter word game (and what to do next)

The best starting words for a five-letter word game are ones built from common letters, with two or three vowels and no repeats — words like RAISE, CRATE, TRACE and SLATE. But the opener is only a fifth of the story. What you do with guess two, and how you handle repeated letters, decides far more games than the first word ever will.

This guide is written for BrainBreak’s daily word, which is our own Wordle-style game rather than Wordle itself, though the same thinking carries over to any game of this shape: a hidden five-letter word, six guesses, and tiles that turn green for the right letter in the right place, yellow for the right letter in the wrong place, and grey for a letter that is not there.

What makes a good first guess

Your first guess knows nothing. Its only job is to collect as much information as possible, and a guess collects information in three ways.

1. Common letters. A letter that is in the answer lights up yellow or green; a letter that is not turns grey and rules itself out. Both are useful, but the common letters are the ones that split the possibilities most evenly. E, A, R, I, O, T, L and N are the backbone of most five-letter words.
2. Vowel coverage. Almost every answer has at least one of A, E, I, O or U, and knowing which vowels are in play narrows things down quickly. Two or three vowels is the sweet spot. Four vowels sounds clever but leaves little room for consonants, which are what actually pin the word down.
3. Positions. A green is worth much more than a yellow, so it helps to put letters where they usually sit. E is very often the last letter; R and A like the second slot; S likes the first.

And one rule overrides all three: no repeated letters in an opener. A second E in your first guess is a wasted tile — you could have tested a whole new letter instead.

A short list of strong openers

Every word below is an ordinary English word and is accepted as a guess in our game. The last column comes from a quick count we ran against BrainBreak’s own answer list: across every answer, how many of the opener’s letters turn up somewhere in the word, on average. It is a rough measure of how much each one tends to tell you, not a precise ranking — and it only describes our list, not anyone else’s.

The spread is narrow. Any of these is a fine opener, and the difference between them is small next to the difference between a good second guess and a bad one. Pick one you like and stick with it for a while — using the same opener every day means you start to recognise what its patterns of colour usually mean.

Two things our own answer list says

Counting through our answers turned up two facts worth knowing. First, E really is the letter to test: it appears in just over half of them, and in roughly a quarter it is the final letter. Second, S is much less useful than you might expect. Our answers are chosen to be words worth learning, so they are not plurals — only one ends in S — which makes S-heavy openers like STARE slightly weaker here than elsewhere.

The second guess is where games are won

Once the first row has revealed its colours, you have a choice. Either you use guess two to try for the answer, or you use it to gather more information. The right choice depends on how much you learned.

• Mostly grey? Do not panic, and do not try to guess the word yet. Play five fresh letters that do not overlap with the first row. After CRATE, a word like LOUSY or MOIST tests an almost entirely new set. Two rows of ten different letters usually leave only a handful of candidates.
• A couple of yellows? Move them. A yellow tells you where a letter is not, so put it somewhere new while testing two or three fresh letters around it.
• A green or two? Now it is worth starting to shape real candidates. Keep the greens where they are and fill the other slots with letters that could plausibly complete a word.

A useful habit before every guess from the second onwards: say out loud, or at least in your head, what you know. “There is an A but not first, the word ends in E, no R, no T, no C.” Players who lose with guesses to spare have almost always forgotten one of their own clues.

Handling repeated letters

Repeated letters are the single biggest source of lost games, because nothing on the board warns you that one is coming. On our list, a little more than one answer in five has a letter that appears twice.

Here is how the tiles treat them. A letter only lights up as many times as it actually appears in the answer. If the answer has one E and you guess a word with two, one of them shows as found and the other stays grey — even though E is in the word. Greens are assigned first, so if one of your two Es is in exactly the right place, that is the one that turns green.

That grey tile is information: it tells you there is exactly one E. The reverse is harder. When one E has turned green and you are down to a small set of candidates that do not fit, ask whether the answer might use that letter twice. Words like LEVEL, ARRAY or ALLOY hide in exactly that blind spot.

One more small kindness: guessing a word you have already tried is refused with a message and costs you nothing, and so is a word that is not in the word list. A typing slip never eats a row.

Hard mode, and whether to turn it on

With hard mode switched on in Settings, every hint you uncover has to be reused. A green letter must stay in its place in every later guess, and any letter you know is in the word — green or yellow — must appear again. If you have found two Es, later guesses need two Es. The game tells you specifically what is missing, rather than just saying no.

Hard mode takes away the “burner” second guess described above, so it rewards a better opener and more careful thinking about letter positions. It is a good step once you are winning comfortably in four or five, and a poor one while you are still finding your feet. It is also a setting you can turn on and off freely, so there is no harm in trying it for a week.

Practise without spending your streak

Everyone gets the same daily word, with a new one at midnight your time. If you want to test a new opener or get a feel for hard mode first, practice mode gives you as many puzzles as you like and never touches your daily result or your streak.

And whatever happens, the game ends with the word itself: its meaning, its part of speech and a sentence that uses it properly. Losing still leaves you a word you did not have before. If that part appeals, our piece on word games for adults looks at the other kinds of word puzzle worth your time.