Why ‘ADIEU’ Is a Terrible Wordle Starter, According to the New York Times

There’s a science and art to picking a starting word when you play Wordle. One computer analysis has suggested that CRANE is the best starter; another landed on SALET. But the New York Times has recently done its own analysis of what people actually choose for starter words, and the situation is dire: ADIEU is the most popular starter, yet the least efficient.

To be clear: it’s not the worst word you could play, just the worst out of the 30 most popular starters. The top five, in terms of popularity, are ADIEU, STARE, SLATE, AUDIO, and RAISE. 

But if you take the top 30 and rank them by how well they work, the top five are SLATE, CRANE, LEAST, STARE, and RAISE. My personal favorite, ARISE, is seventh on the list.

Should a Wordle starter have a lot of vowels?

I’m going to teach the controversy here. The argument in favor of ADIEU is that it contains four vowels, and you know the solution will have to contain some vowels. Thus, knocking out four of them in your first guess is pretty smart. (O and the sometimes-vowel Y are the only ones not included.)

But there’s an argument to be made that vowels don’t give you much information, in the data-science sense of narrowing down possibilities. So there’s an A in the solution word somewhere–how much does it help to know that? 

Another strategy is to go with a consonant-heavy word at first, and worry about the vowels later. According to one Wordle expert, “there are only five [vowels], and it’s almost never going to be a U.”

My own approach splits the difference: I think about my starters as a pair. With ARISE and TOUCH, I get intel on all five vowels and five of the most common consonants. If you play ADIEU, I think you need to be prepared to follow it up with THORN. 

Don’t forget about the “sometimes” vowel, Y

Another thing the NYT learned from their analysis is that solution words that contain a Y tend to be harder to solve. 

Y flies under the radar since it’s an end-of-the-alphabet letter. The tendency is to think it must be as rare as X and Z. But Y is fairly common, showing up in words like FUNNY and JAZZY (JAZZY being the hardest word that appeared this year). Words that end in Y also often have a double letter–like the N and Z in those examples–so make sure to consider those as you’re narrowing down the possibilities.

You may recall from grade school that the vowels are “A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y.” (You may even have learned “...and sometimes Y and W.”) That’s because Y really can stand on its own as a vowel: the ending Y in FUNNY is an example: U is the vowel for the first syllable, and Y is the vowel for the second. There are also words that contain a Y as their only vowel, like GLYPH, NYMPH, and TRYST.

So if you’re working on a Wordle and you don’t seem to have enough vowels to make a word, stick a Y in there somewhere–preferably at the end. LANKY or HORNY might be a good pick for when you’re stumped.