Wordle Starting Word Calculator
Type any five-letter word and we'll rate it against every one of the 2,343 legal Wordle answers — not against English at large, which turns out to be a different thing entirely. Try your usual opener, then try ORATE.
Letters only — we rate the letters, so it doesn't have to be a dictionary word.
What the three scores mean
Wordle answers reached is the headline number: the percentage of all 2,343 answers that share at least one letter with your word. If your opener reaches 97% of answers, then on 97% of days your first guess is guaranteed to light up at least one tile — real information, every game. The average-letters figure underneath tells you how much information: an opener that averages two hits per answer narrows the field far faster than one that averages one.
Wordle letter share is the fraction of all 11,715 letters in the answer list that your five letters account for. It's the purest measure of whether you picked popular letters. English letter share is the same calculation against Oxford's letter-frequency analysis of the dictionary — and comparing the two columns is where it gets interesting, because they disagree more than you'd think.
Why Wordle and English disagree
The Wordle answer list is not a sample of English — it's a curated, five-letter, no-plurals slice of it, and that bends the alphabet. N and I, dictionary superstars, get snubbed because the -ING and -TION words that made them famous can't fit in five letters. Y nearly doubles its frequency thanks to hundreds of -Y adjectives. Z shows up five times more often than the dictionary says it should. We wrote up the full analysis, with charts for every letter, in Why Does Wordle Hate the Letter N? — this calculator is that article's data, made interactive.
That divergence is why a starter chosen from an English frequency chart can be mis-tuned for the actual game. The five most common letters in Wordle answers (E, A, R, O, T) anagram into ORATE — a statistically ideal opener that, in a delightful twist, isn't in the answer list itself. English's top letters instead build IRATE and RATIO, which are. For the fuller strategy conversation — including why the SLATE/CRANE family keeps winning solver rankings — see our guide to the best Wordle starting words.
A few things the score can't see
Letter coverage is the foundation of a good opener, but it isn't the whole game. Position matters (Y is only valuable because it lives in slot five), and so does the shape of what remains after the greens and yellows come back — solver rankings like WordleBot weigh both. Treat a high score here as "this word fishes in the right pond," not a guarantee of a three-guess week. And words with repeated letters score honestly here: a double letter means only four unique hooks in the water, which the calculator will warn you about. The flip side is also true: a word that scores modestly here can still be a fine opener if its letters sit in their most common positions, so use the score as a compass rather than a verdict.
If you enjoy this kind of daily word puzzle, we build one: Pairdle is our free daily game where you decode a six-letter word two letters at a time — and as the article shows, its letter distribution hews closer to real English than Wordle's does. More game guides live in our guides hub.
Methodology: answer-list statistics computed across all 2,343 legal Wordle answers; English baseline is Oxford's letter-frequency analysis of Concise Oxford English Dictionary headwords. All calculation happens in your browser. Last updated 2026-08-18.