Guide

Starting words, measured on this dictionary

By this site's count, the best opener is TARES. The count runs over the 8,624 five-letter words in Word Sieve's list, an ENABLE1-derived edition with 39 entries excluded, and ranks the 5,658 of them made of five different letters. Each letter of a candidate scores two numbers, added together: how many five-letter words have that letter in that square, and how many contain it anywhere. Presence and position count equally, and no weighting is added to move a favorite word up. The ten highest, in order:

TARES, LARES, RALES, RATES, NARES, CARES, DARES, TALES, PARES, MARES.

Four letters dominate the list. S appears somewhere in 3,994 of the 8,624 five-letter words, E in 3,878, A in 3,492 and R in 2,669. Next come O at 2,529, I at 2,426, L at 2,167 and T at 2,084. A first guess is there to confirm or rule out as much of the list as it can, and an opener built from the top of that table does more of that than any rare-letter word can.

The second guess

The reply to your opener decides the follow-up. If TARES comes back mostly green and yellow, stay with those letters and let the clue solver narrow the field. If it comes back mostly gray, spend the second guess on five new letters, and the same frequency count ranks those too. Among five-distinct-letter words that share no letter with TARES, the list ranks NOILY, DOILY, COLIN, POIND and POILU highest. TARES then NOILY tests T, A, R, E, S, N, O, I, L and Y in two moves, which covers nine of the twelve most common letters in the five-letter slice. The three it misses are U, D and C, and Y ranks 13th. Two guesses with no letter in common leave the third guess a list of survivors short enough to read through.

A probe can be any word the puzzle accepts, including one that could never be the answer, and its job is to divide the field. The best-known daily puzzle, for instance, uses no plurals ending in S as answers. That pushes S down the table for answers and leaves it just as useful in probes.

Letting the solver count

Once the clues come back, the clue solver does the counting. It filters the same 8,624 words by your greens, yellows and grays, then re-ranks the survivors by how common each letter is in its square among the words still standing. A letter that appears twice in a word scores once, so a guess gets no extra credit for spending two squares on one letter. The five-letter list shows the whole slice at once, and you can filter it by how a word starts or ends or by a run of letters it contains.

What the ranking covers

These ranks describe this list. A daily puzzle draws its answers from its own smaller, curated list, and a frequency count over a different list ranks differently, usually by only a few places, because English letter frequency is stubborn. Word Sieve is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Scrabble, Words with Friends, Wordle, or their publishers.