Guide

Starting words, measured on this dictionary

Ask this site's own five-letter slice — 8,636 words — which opener touches the most of it, and the answer is not an opinion. Among the 5,665 five-letter words made of five different letters, score each by adding, for every letter, how often that letter appears in that position plus how many five-letter words contain it at all. The ten highest, in order:

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

The pattern behind the table is plain: S, E, A and R dominate this list. S appears somewhere in 4,001 of the 8,636 five-letter words, E in 3,881, A in 3,495, R in 2,670 — then O at 2,533, I at 2,429, L at 2,167 and T at 2,086. An opener built from the top of that table eliminates or confirms more of the dictionary per guess than any rare-letter word can, which is the whole job of a first guess.

What this measures, and what it does not

These ranks are a property of 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 a few places, not by much, because English letter frequency is stubborn. The method here is printed with the result so you can quarrel with it precisely: presence plus position, distinct letters only, no weighting invented to move a favorite word up. Word Sieve is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Scrabble, Words with Friends, Wordle, or their publishers.

Once the clues come back, counting stops being hand work: the clue solver filters the same 8,636 words by your greens, yellows and grays and re-ranks what survives, and the five-letter list lets you read the slice whole — every word, filterable by where a letter sits.

The second guess

A strong opener earns most of its value on the reply, and the reply decides the follow-up. If TARES comes back mostly green and yellow, stay in that half of the alphabet and let the clue solver re-rank what survives. If it comes back mostly gray, the right second probe avoids every letter you just spent — and the same frequency count answers that question too. Among five-distinct-letter words sharing no letter with TARES, the list ranks NOILY, DOILY, COLIN, POIND and POILU highest: between them the two guesses cover T, A, R, E, S, N, O, I, L and Y — ten of the twelve most common letters in the five-letter slice — in two moves. That coverage, not any single word, is the actual strategy: two disjoint high-frequency probes leave the third guess with a survivor set small enough to read whole.

The honest caveat repeats: these are facts about ENABLE1's 8,636 five-letter words. A puzzle's answer list is curated — no plurals ending in S, for instance, in the best-known daily game — which nudges S off its throne for answers while leaving it priceless for probes. A probe does not have to be a possible answer; it has to divide the field.