More of your opener suggestions, run the same way as the ones from my 47-opener post and the follow-up with your first 21. This time u/TrackVol sent me a list with four parts: a set of truly bad openers, SLART (a 4-consonant word predicted to beat CLASP), five words with two Es predicted to beat ADIEU, and every word that Scoredle, WordleBot and Wordle Tools have ever listed as #1. I ran all of them the same way as before: a bot plays all 1,898 past Wordle answers, with the same strategy after the first guess every time. Normal mode, and a loss counts as 7 guesses.

That's 19 new openers (XVIII isn't in the bot's dictionary, so I left it out), which brings the table to 87. This batch is in bold. JAZZY is bold too: I ran it for my first post but left it out of the last table.

Rank	Opener	Avg guesses	Solved in 3 or fewer	Alone fastest
1	SLATE	3.665	44.8%	3
2	LEAST	3.671	44.2%	3
3	SALET	3.672	43.8%	2
4	STALE	3.688	43.5%	2
5	LEANT	3.691	44.3%	7
6	TARSE	3.692	42.8%	1
7	SLART	3.697	42.9%	3
8	TEARS	3.697	42.7%	1
9	TRACE	3.701	43.4%	1
10	CRATE	3.703	43.4%	2
11	SNARE	3.709	42.5%	3
12	CRANE	3.709	42.1%	5
13	DEALT	3.712	41.8%	10
14	CLEAT	3.712	42.4%	4
15	PLATE	3.714	41.6%	1
16	TARPS	3.715	41.3%	3
17	TRAIN	3.715	42.9%	4
18	STARE	3.717	41.9%	2
19	LEARN	3.718	42.0%	6
20	TRADE	3.718	42.0%	8
21	CARLE	3.720	42.3%	5
22	TASER	3.720	41.2%	2
23	ALERT	3.723	41.9%	3
24	TARES	3.723	40.7%	0
25	ALTER	3.724	41.3%	2
26	TROPE	3.724	41.4%	9
27	REACT	3.726	41.6%	3
28	TIARE	3.726	42.5%	3
29	CLASP	3.726	39.8%	4
30	SANER	3.727	41.7%	5
31	HEART	3.729	42.4%	4
32	LEADS	3.729	41.9%	3
33	PARSE	3.729	40.4%	5
34	IRATE	3.731	41.9%	5
35	CASTE	3.736	40.6%	2
36	STERN	3.736	39.9%	2
37	ROATE	3.737	41.6%	3
38	PLACE	3.738	41.0%	8
39	MEANS	3.740	39.7%	9
40	TREND	3.743	39.6%	6
41	TRASH	3.750	41.1%	1
42	LATER	3.752	40.0%	4
43	SHIRT	3.753	41.1%	7
44	RAISE	3.757	41.5%	3
45	AROSE	3.762	40.1%	0
46	SAUCE	3.764	38.4%	6
47	AISLE	3.766	40.9%	4
48	SAUTE	3.767	39.4%	2
49	LOADS	3.767	38.5%	5
50	SOARE	3.771	40.7%	0
51	ECLAT	3.772	39.6%	2
52	ARISE	3.777	40.9%	1
53	EARTH	3.778	39.2%	3
54	STOAE	3.783	38.1%	1
55	TERSE	3.806	37.2%	4
56	OCEAN	3.806	37.6%	9
57	RATIO	3.806	39.0%	8
58	STYLE	3.806	35.9%	4
59	SLEET	3.808	36.6%	2
60	CHAIR	3.810	37.8%	9
61	ROUTE	3.810	36.9%	6
62	STEAM	3.816	36.3%	8
63	REATE	3.818	36.8%	2
64	ARETE	3.822	37.2%	3
65	EARLY	3.822	36.8%	7
66	BROTH	3.826	35.4%	12
67	AUDIT	3.829	37.5%	7
68	PIANO	3.830	37.1%	10
69	ADIOS	3.831	35.9%	1
70	MEDIA	3.843	34.8%	14
71	MOUSE	3.846	36.0%	11
72	HOUSE	3.857	35.8%	7
73	SAREE	3.860	35.8%	0
74	TEATS	3.874	33.9%	1
75	PIOUS	3.890	33.4%	10
76	FLING	3.924	31.7%	30
77	ADIEU	3.927	32.3%	4
78	AUDIO	3.930	33.6%	3
79	OUIJA	4.101	25.0%	5
80	SQUIZ	4.184	21.1%	2
81	QUAWK	4.185	19.8%	11
82	JUJUS	4.353	13.9%	1
83	JAZZY	4.377	13.4%	6
84	ZHUZH	4.388	13.6%	4
85	JEEZE	4.435	13.0%	3
86	XYLYL	4.445	13.7%	4
87	QAJAQ	4.501	9.7%	1

"Alone fastest" counts the past answers where that opener beat every other opener in this table outright. It's now measured against 86 rivals, so most numbers are lower than in my last post.

TrackVol's predictions, checked:

• QAJAQ is the worst opener in the table. 4.501 guesses a game, last of 87. It solves in three or fewer only 9.7% of the time, and it lost 4 games (BOOBY, DANDY, DOPEY, ULCER). XYLYL (4.445) and JEEZE (4.435) are next, and JAZZY, ZHUZH and JUJUS sit just above them.
• SQUIZ and QUAWK are the best of the bad words. They're the only two of the eight without a repeated letter, and they finish 80th and 81st, a hair apart at 4.184 and 4.185. Five different letters still buy you something, even when they're Q, U and Z. QUAWK is also a gambler: it beat every other opener outright on 11 answers.
• SLART beats CLASP easily. 7th overall at 3.697, level with TEARS. CLASP is 29th at 3.726. SLART is the best opener in the table with only one vowel.
• The two-E words all beat ADIEU. TERSE (55th), SLEET (59th), REATE (63rd), ARETE (64th) and SAREE (73rd) all finish ahead of ADIEU (77th), AUDIO (78th) and OUIJA (79th). Even SAREE is 0.07 guesses a game better than ADIEU.

The #1 picks from Scoredle, WordleBot and Wordle Tools are all in the table now. Ranked by this bot:

Rank	Opener	Avg guesses
1	SLATE	3.665
2	LEAST	3.671
3	SALET	3.672
6	TARSE	3.692
7	SLART	3.697
9	TRACE	3.701
12	CRANE	3.709
13	DEALT	3.712
15	PLATE	3.714
16	TARPS	3.715
21	CARLE	3.720
24	TARES	3.723
26	TROPE	3.724
29	CLASP	3.726
30	SANER	3.727
38	PLACE	3.738
50	SOARE	3.771

A few other things stood out:

• Every tool's #1 is a good opener here. 16 of the 17 finish in the top 40, all within 0.08 guesses of SLATE. The rankings differ because each tool scores the first guess its own way, and the gaps at the top are tiny.
• DEALT is the sleeper. 13th at 3.712, and it beat every other opener outright on 10 answers, more than any opener in the top 60.
• TARSE beats TARES. Same five letters, but TARSE is 6th and TARES is 24th. TARES also lost 2 games (BAKER, QUEER), the most of any reader suggestion outside the bad words.
• SOARE is the odd one out. 50th, and it never beat every other opener outright on a single answer.

Losses: QAJAQ 4, ZHUZH 5, JEEZE 5, JAZZY 6, XYLYL 3, SQUIZ 3, QUAWK 2, TARES 2, and SLART, TERSE, SLEET, REATE, ARETE, SAREE and JUJUS 1 each, out of 1,898 games. DEALT, TROPE, PLACE and TARPS never lost.

Where the suggestions came from:

• All 47 openers ranked, from SLATE to OUIJA: the comments here gave me the first 21 reader openers, and TrackVol's CARLE.
• Your 21 suggested openers, ranked alongside the 47: the results for those 21.

Same disclosure as before: I build the solver used here.

In my opener posts, SLATE comes out on top on average. But no opener wins every day, so I built a page that shows how five openers did on each day's puzzle.

Every Wordle since #1 (June 2021) has its own page. The Word Bot plays each puzzle from five starting words, PLATE, STARE, STALE, SLATE and CLASP, and the page shows how many guesses each one needed.

Some recent games (past puzzles only, nothing from today):

Wordle	Answer	Fastest opener	SLATE
#1,924	COPSE	CLASP in 2	4
#1,930	RITZY	STARE, SLATE, CLASP in 4	4
#1,931	USURY	STARE in 3	4
#1,932	PEEVE	PLATE, STARE, STALE, SLATE in 4	4

COPSE shows the idea best. CLASP put C and S in the right spots and found the P, which left just two possible answers, so the bot guessed COPSE next. From SLATE the bot needed four guesses.

Each page shows:

• The bot's board, with the number of possible answers left after each guess. For USURY: STARE → 43 left → USURP → 1 left → USURY.
• All five openers side by side, with the guesses each one needed.
• Hints: first and last letter, vowels, repeated letters, and the meaning of the word.
• A box to try your own opener and watch the bot replay that day's puzzle from it.

Today's answer stays hidden until the game closes. You can see how many guesses each opener took, but not the word, so the page is safe to open before you play.

Archive: https://turnword.com/wordle. A single puzzle is at turnword.com/wordle/1924, or enter a number, date or answer on the archive page.

Disclosure: I build the solver behind this. Suggestions welcome, especially other openers you'd like added.

I ran all 14,823 five-letter words as a first guess against the online list of 2,362 NYT Wordle answers, using real Wordle scoring rules.

Every one of the 100 best openers uses five different letters.

The best opener that repeats a letter ranks #405.

But here’s the interesting part: 32.6% of Wordle answers repeat a letter.

So “no repeats” is a very good opening rule. It is definitely not a game rule.

Disclosure: I build the tools at turnword.com; the numbers below come from our word database.

Why five different letters matter on guess one

A Wordle guess is essentially five questions asked at once. Each tile comes back green, yellow, or gray, and each color tells you something about one letter.

Five different letters means five different questions.

A repeated letter means you asked one of them twice.

The cleanest way to measure a guess is by how much it shrinks the field. Before guess one, the answer could be any of 2,362 words. After it, the color pattern rules out every answer that would have produced a different pattern.

A good opener splits the list into many small groups. A poor one lumps most of it into a few big ones.

Information theory puts a number on this in bits, but the figure that’s easier to feel is: how many candidates would you expect to have left after the guess?

The numbers

• 9,347 of 14,823 five-letter words (63.1%) use five different letters.
• The strongest opener overall, TARSE, delivers 5.95 bits. It cuts the field from 2,362 to an expected 68 candidates in one move. TARSE is obscure, as words at the top of these rankings often are.
• The strongest opener that’s also an everyday answer-list word is RAISE: #5 overall, 5.88 bits, and just 62 expected candidates left.
• The strongest opener that repeats a letter, SAREE, delivers 5.42 bits and leaves an expected 101 candidates. It ranks #405 of 14,823.
• Averaged across the whole dictionary, a no-repeat word is worth 4.69 bits as an opener versus 3.98 bits for a word with a repeated letter.
• Of the 100 best openers, all 100 use five different letters.

Here’s how some familiar choices compare. “Candidates left” means how many possible answers you’d expect to be choosing between, on average, after seeing the colors:

Opener	Repeats?	Bits	Candidates left	Rank
RAISE	No	5.88	62	#5
SLATE	No	5.86	74	#8
TRACE	No	5.82	77	#14
CRANE	No	5.73	81	#41
ADIEU	No	4.89	125	#3,386
AUDIO	No	4.62	184	#6,010
EERIE	Yes	4.30	216	#9,187
GEESE	Yes	3.86	335	#12,341
LEVEL	Yes	3.62	421	#13,395
SASSY	Yes	3.39	406	#14,075
MAMMA	Yes	2.41	789	#14,802

Two things stand out.

First, the gap between a good no-repeat opener and a repeat-letter opener isn’t a rounding error. It can mean starting guess two with a manageable field instead of a much larger one.

Second, the fashionable vowel-heavy openers like ADIEU and AUDIO are weaker than their reputation suggests. Vowels are common, so confirming them tells you less than you might think. The consonants they skip often do more of the work separating one possible answer from another.

What does a repeated letter actually cost?

Think about what two tiles containing the same letter can tell you.

If the letter isn’t in the answer, both tiles come back gray. You learned one basic fact but spent two tiles getting it.

If the letter occurs once, one tile may be colored and the other gray. That’s genuinely useful because you’ve learned something about the letter count, but you still spent a tile that could have tested another letter.

If the answer contains that letter twice, both tiles can earn their keep.

But on guess one, you don’t know that yet.

Meanwhile, the fifth letter you could have tested goes completely unexamined, and every answer containing it remains in play.

So when should you repeat a letter?

This is the part most “best starting word” lists leave out.

769 of the 2,362 answers — 32.6% — contain a repeated letter.

That’s roughly one in three answers.

So refusing to play repeated letters throughout the game makes no sense.

The strategy changes as the game progresses.

On guess one, variety wins because the field is huge.

By guess four or five, you may be looking at a handful of near-identical survivors — the classic _OUND family:

BOUND, FOUND, HOUND, MOUND, POUND, ROUND, SOUND, WOUND

Or one of the notorious _IGHT families.

At that point, the goal is no longer “test five new letters.” The goal is to play the word that best separates the remaining candidates.

Sometimes that word contains a repeated letter.

Sometimes it’s a word that can’t possibly be the answer, chosen purely because its letters distinguish among the survivors.

So the rule I’d take away from the data is:

Early game: maximize information.
Late game: discriminate between what’s left.

“No repeated letters” is excellent advice for your opener.

It’s terrible advice for an entire game.

We built TurnWord for people who enjoy Wordle and other five-letter word puzzles and want a few more ways to play.

You can play completely on your own, just like Wordle, or ask TurnWord for an AI suggestion when you’re stuck, curious about the best move, or simply want to get better at the game. The AI is optional — you’re always the one playing.

The TurnWord Word Player also lets you play unlimited puzzles, undo a mistaken guess, adjust the difficulty and strictness of the game, and even play 2 or 4 boards at once, where every guess applies across all the boards.

We built it because we like word games and wanted to experiment with what happens when you give the player more control, more ways to play, and a little help when they want it.

Give it a try — and since we're still improving it, we'd genuinely like to hear what you think. And if you like digging a little deeper, TurnWord has several other apps for solving puzzles, exploring words, testing strategies, and seeing how our AI Word Bot would play the game.

https://preview.redd.it/djah6fsya4oh1.png?width=1189&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c062328e01a1adc178a8a47c5b38895cbd4bb4c

Ever have a board where you've got a green in one spot, a yellow you know can't go where you tried it, and a few grays — and you just want the exact list of words that satisfy all of it at once, not a vague suggestion?

Built TurnWord Advanced Finder for that. It's part of a small free suite for daily 5-letter word games (turnword.com):

• Enter letters into a 5-tile row, mark each green / yellow / gray — same as your actual board
• Optional Present / Absent fields for letters you know are (or aren't) in the word but haven't pinned to a position yet
• Applies every constraint at once against a 14,823-word dictionary (2,433 of which are answer-eligible) and returns the complete matching list, ranked by frequency
• Click any result to load it back into the row and keep narrowing, same as playing out guess after guess

Worked example: say you've played TARPS (T absent, A green, R present-wrong-spot, P absent, S absent), then RAINY (R green, A green, I present-wrong-spot, N absent, Y absent). Type your latest guess into the tile row with its real feedback, then drop any leftover absent letters from earlier guesses — here, just T/P/S — into the Absent field. One search, every constraint from both guesses applied at once: RADIO, RABBI, RABID, RADII, RAKHI, and more, ranked by frequency.

https://preview.redd.it/42ueo4x1sjoh1.png?width=1292&format=png&auto=webp&s=5cd3be82cf372b7919ca6ae0b4a603876b77f552

One thing that trips up a lot of similar tools: repeated letters. If a gray letter already showed up green or yellow elsewhere on the board, it means "not more of this letter than what's confirmed," not "none of this letter" — get that wrong and a valid list can collapse to zero. Worth checking on any tool you use.

No account, no ads: turnword.com/apps/word-advanced-finder

I've been thinking about something that sounds simple but gets surprisingly interesting: What does "best next guess" actually mean in Wordle?

There are at least four very different ways to decide what to play next:

1. Word frequency: Which word is most likely to be the answer?
2. Entropy: Which guess will teach me the most on average?
3. Worst case: Which guess protects me if I get the least helpful feedback possible?
4. Neural network: Which guess has the model learned tends to lead to the best outcome?

They often agree. But when they don't, that's where things get interesting.

1. Word frequency — "Take your best shot"

Suppose your remaining candidates are:

TRAIL / TRIAL

A frequency-based strategy asks which is more likely to be the actual answer and guesses that one.

If TRAIL is substantially more likely, play TRAIL.

The advantage is obvious: every guess is a genuine attempt to solve the puzzle. You're maximizing your chance of winning now.

The downside is that frequency doesn't necessarily care how much you learn if you're wrong. The most likely answer isn't always the guess that best separates the remaining possibilities.

So frequency asks:

"Which word is most likely to be right?"

2. Entropy — "Which guess teaches me the most?"

Entropy asks a completely different question:

"Whatever Wordle tells me after this guess, how much will I learn?"

Every guess divides the remaining answers into groups based on the green/yellow/gray feedback they would produce.

Imagine 20 answers remain.

One guess might divide them into groups like:

5 / 5 / 4 / 3 / 2 / 1

Another might produce:

14 / 2 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1

The first is much more informative. Whatever feedback you get, you're likely to end up with a fairly small group.

That's the basic idea behind entropy: maximize expected information gain.

And the highest-entropy guess doesn't necessarily have to be a possible answer. Sometimes it's worth spending a guess purely to gather information.

So entropy asks:

"Which guess leaves me knowing the most, on average?"

3. Worst case — "What's the worst position this guess can leave me in?"

Worst-case strategy, often called minimax, looks at the same groups as entropy but scores them differently.

Instead of caring about the average, it looks at the largest group.

Using our example:

5 / 5 / 4 / 3 / 2 / 1 → worst case = 5

14 / 2 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 → worst case = 14

Minimax chooses the first.

It's essentially saying:

"Assume I'm unlucky. Which guess hurts me least?"

That's a very different objective from maximizing your chance of getting the answer immediately.

It's also the basic idea behind Donald Knuth's famous Mastermind strategy.

4. Neural network — "What has experience taught me to play?"

This one is fundamentally different.

Frequency, entropy, and minimax start with an explicit rule for what makes a guess good.

A neural network can instead learn which guesses tend to produce good outcomes from large numbers of training examples or simulated games.

Give it the current board — previous guesses, feedback, and the resulting game state — and it scores possible moves based on patterns it learned during training.

What's interesting is that it can learn behavior resembling the other strategies without explicitly calculating them.

Early in the game, it may favor highly informative guesses and look a lot like entropy.

When it encounters a dangerous word family, it may learn that probing several distinguishing letters is safer than guessing candidates one at a time — behavior that looks more like minimax.

And when only a few candidates remain, it may decide that taking a shot at an answer is better than gathering more information.

Nobody necessarily told it:

"Use entropy now."

or:

"Switch to minimax here."

Those behaviors can emerge from what the model was trained to optimize.

So the neural-network question is roughly:

"Based on what I've learned from playing positions like this, which move gives me the best expected outcome?"

The tradeoff is explainability.

With entropy, I can show exactly why a guess scored highly.

With minimax, I can show its largest remaining group.

With a neural network, I can see what it recommends, but understanding why may require analyzing the recommendation afterward.

Where they really separate: Wordle traps

Suppose you've discovered:

_ATCH

and the possibilities include:

BATCH / CATCH / HATCH / LATCH / MATCH / WATCH

Simply guessing candidates one after another can be dangerous.

Guess WATCH, and if W is gray, you've eliminated WATCH — but five possibilities remain.

In normal mode, you may be better off playing a probe that tests several of B/C/H/L/M/W at once, even though the probe itself can't possibly be the answer.

Now the strategies can diverge sharply.

Frequency: Pick whichever _ATCH candidate is most likely to be the answer.

Entropy: Find the guess that best separates the six possibilities on average.

Minimax: Find the guess whose worst possible result leaves the fewest candidates.

Neural network: Use what it learned from similar positions to decide whether to attack the answer, gather information, or protect against the trap.

There's also an important Hard Mode wrinkle: once ATCH is green, you have to keep those letters in place. Many useful probe words therefore become illegal.

That's one reason these families can be particularly nasty in Hard Mode.

So what does "best guess" actually mean?

That's the part I find most interesting.

There isn't necessarily one answer because the four strategies are solving slightly different problems:

Word frequency: maximize the chance of being right now.

Entropy: maximize expected information.

Worst case/minimax: minimize the damage if you're unlucky.

Neural network: learn from many games which moves tend to produce the best overall results.

The first three start by defining mathematically what a "good guess" is.

The fourth says, essentially:

Play a huge number of games and learn what works.

And sometimes the neural network ends up behaving like entropy. Sometimes like minimax. Sometimes it just takes the shot.

Which strategy comes closest to how you actually play Wordle?

We built TurnWord for people who enjoy Wordle and other five-letter word puzzles and want a few more ways to play.

You can play completely on your own, just like Wordle, or ask TurnWord for an AI suggestion when you’re stuck, curious about the best move, or simply want to get better at the game. The AI is optional — you’re always the one playing.

The TurnWord Word Player also lets you play unlimited puzzles, undo a mistaken guess, adjust the difficulty and strictness of the game, and even play 2 or 4 boards at once, where every guess applies across all the boards.

We built it because we like word games and wanted to experiment with what happens when you give the player more control, more ways to play, and a little help when they want it.

Give it a try — and since we're still improving it, we'd genuinely like to hear what you think. And if you like digging a little deeper, TurnWord has several other apps for solving puzzles, exploring words, testing strategies, and seeing how our AI Word Bot would play the game.

https://preview.redd.it/djah6fsya4oh1.png?width=1189&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c062328e01a1adc178a8a47c5b38895cbd4bb4c

https://preview.redd.it/r7ece3oecynh1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=9f6412600d1d2d0f0ec4759790b4f29f2c1fbf9c

Adhere to all green, yellow, gray rules in Wordle.

Green ✓ — Correct: Right letter, right position. Keep it there.

Yellow ○ — Present: Right letter, wrong position. Move it next guess.

Gray — Absent: Letter not in word.

Adhere to all green, yellow, gray Wordle rules.

• Green ✓ — Correct: Right letter, right position. Keep it there.
• Yellow ○ — Present: Right letter, wrong position. Move it next guess.
• Gray — Absent: Letter not in word.

https://preview.redd.it/al02jr7b6qnh1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=c125aebbbde2da98ec1b58465e6f8a477503da94

Post Opening Word guess in comments

More Wordle tools at turnword.com

I started today's Wordle with "GRUEL" based a recent article I read in the news. Solved the game in 3 guesses.

Good luck!

I usually blow guess 2. This time I stopped and thought about it first. Writing down what happened.

**1.** >!SLATE!< → ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
Two letters in the word, both in the wrong spot. Three common letters gone. That's the job.

**2.** >!DETER!< → ⬜🟨🟨🟩⬜
This is the one I'm happy about. There were words that fit. I could have just tried one. Instead I moved both known letters to new positions and tested two new consonants at the same time. Got a green, found a second copy of a letter, killed two more consonants.

**3.** >!TWEET!< → 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
Now it's down to two words that differ by one letter. I had three guesses left, so I took one of them instead of playing something safe. If it's wrong I learn the last letter and win next turn. Playing safe there guarantees 4 and gives up the chance at 3.

**4.** >!TWEEN!< → 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Two things I want to remember. On guess 2 you can't afford to gamble, so don't. On a late two-way split with a spare guess the gamble is free, so take it.

(My friend and I built a word solver, so we're the kind of people who write this down afterward. None of it needs a tool though.)

Did anyone play guess 3 the other way?

Scoredle 3/6*

14,855

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 2,270

🟩⬜🟨🟩⬜ 1

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Eight answers end in -IGHT: EIGHT, FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT. They differ in one letter.

Say you open with BIGOT and get ⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩. Great board — three greens, pattern obvious. In Hard Mode it's already lost in the worst case: every legal guess has to keep I, G and T in place, so every legal guess is a -IGHT word, and each one tests a single first letter. Seven candidates, five guesses left. No guess exists that tests two.

That's the trap. It isn't the word, it's that by the time you can see the pattern, the rules have taken away every move that could split it.

With Hard Mode off you just throw away a word: TERMS tests E, R, M, S, T at once and cuts eight to three.

In Hard Mode the only defense comes one guess earlier. Open with PILOT instead and you get ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 — I and T locked, L ruled out, the middle still open. Seven of the family remain. Now FIRST is legal, and it tests F, R and S at once: worst case four left, four guesses — a guaranteed solve, PILOT → FIRST → EIGHT → MIGHT → NIGHT → TIGHT. NIGHT is legal too, and tests one: worst case six left, four guesses — you'd need an eighth. Same pattern either way; one guess spent it on the letter you didn't have.

The difference between PILOT and BIGOT is the G. Reveal it and every later guess must keep it; leave the middle open and you keep one probe alive.

Same trap in -OUND (eight words), -ATCH and -OWER (seven).

Pinning: a first guess that leaves exactly one word possible.

BRUTE pins 40 answers, more than any opener. Typical is 22; CRANE 29, RAISE 26.

But for information gained, RAISE ranks 1st and BRUTE 321st. Same words, opposite answer, depending which question you ask.

Spoilers for 1,885 below, all tagged.

I ran all 19 openers from the NYT's reader chart against the answer to 1,885 through TurnWord Word Bot, an AI-trained solver I've been building, and counted how many words were still possible after guess one. Starting pool: 13k five-letter words.

Words left standing after the opening guess:

• Narrowed most: >!IRATE (5 left), ORATE (6), TRACE (10), TRAIN (16)!<
• Middle: >!STARE (30), SLATE (65), TARPS (73), ADIEU (161)!<
• Narrowed least: >!STEAL (330), PLACE (484), AUDIO (1,187), CLASP (roughly 1,900)!<

Worth saying clearly: none of these are bad openers. All 19 solved, and the spread was only >!two to four guesses — the two sharpest got there in two, fourteen in three, and the three loosest in four!<. >!PLACE left 484 words on the table and still finished in three.!< A big pool going into guess two isn't trouble; it just means the second guess does more of the work.

Two things that did surprise me:

Grey letters carry the load. &gt;!CLASP came back completely blank — no greens, no yellows — and that "failure" still killed 85% of the list.!< A whiff is information.

Letter coverage isn't elimination. &gt;!AUDIO covers four vowels and left 1,187 words alive. TRACE covers two and left 10.!< Knowing which letters are absent narrows far less than knowing where a letter sits.

So the useful question for an opener isn't "how many common letters does it have," it's "how many words does each possible result kill." Those rank differently — but on a day like 1,885, almost anything gets you home.

Drop your usual opener below and I'll run it against 1,885 for you. Or run it yourself — the bot's at turnword.com/apps/word-game-bot, free and no signup.

My business partner and I run a small studio called Hyperbotic LLC, and TurnWord is what we've been heads-down on. It's in beta. Five connected apps for 5-letter word puzzles, covering learning, playing, solving, and assisting depending on what you want out of a puzzle.

Starting with the one people seem to find most interesting:

Word Bot — give it a starting word and a target, and it plays the whole puzzle out, guess by guess, so you can watch how the AI reasons instead of just taking its answer. Swap the opener and the path gets shorter or longer in front of you. This is the one that made me rethink my own starting word.

Word Solver — the same engine, pointed at your live game. A neural net ranks candidate guesses by how much they'd narrow the remaining possibilities, not by how likely they are to be correct. Those are different objectives, and optimizing for the first one wins more games.

Word Player — an actual playable game rather than a tool. Unlimited puzzles, 1, 2, or 4 boards at once. Adjustable guess limits and difficulty, with AI suggestions on tap if you want them and ignorable if you don't.

Quick Finder — mark the letters you know and the ones you've ruled out, get every matching word. For when you're stuck and just want the field narrowed.

Advanced Finder — position-aware version. Green, yellow, gray set per slot, so you can encode a full board state instead of just which letters are in play.

There are also write-ups behind the tools: letter frequency breakdowns, common patterns, and which opening words hold up when you actually test them against the full answer list.

We built it because we kept arguing about opening-word strategy and wanted something better than vibes to settle it. Nothing's monetized and we haven't decided if it will be.

What I'd most like feedback on is the solver's recommendations. If it hands you a guess that feels wrong, reply with the board state and I'll dig into why it chose that.

https://turnword.com