TikToker reveals best starting words to solve your Wordle

It’s the addictive daily word game taking over the world – and now a computer scientist has revealed the top five starting words to solve your Wordle.

This addictive daily word game is taking over the world, your office, and probably your mind.

And while everyone – from language experts to Reddit users – have put their two cents in over the best first guess to start with on Wordle, one TikToker claims to have found the most efficient one – and has the coding knowledge to prove it.

If you’re not one of the millions of people who partake each day, Wordle players have six tries to guess a target five-letter word.

Every time they make a guess, they are told which letters in their guess are in the word and in the right spot (by turning green), and which letters are in the word but in a different position (by turning yellow). If they’re not right at all, they turn black.

Which begs the question – when you’ve only got six tries, what is the best first word to guess?

Can you guess the word? Picture: Stefani Reynolds/AFP

According to computer scientist Chris, who posts to TikTok under the handle @Crvlwanek, the best word to kick off the puzzle with is not “adieu” or, as one linguist recently claimed, “irate”.

Instead, after running a bunch of code to fact-check the theory and finding the game’s entire word list, Chris used a script to calculate the frequency of every individual letter in the alphabet.

He then ordered the words on the list based on how statistically prevalent each letter is – for example, the most common letter is “e”, which appears in 46 per cent of words in the English language.

@crvlwanek#stitch with @linguisticdiscovery Different method, similar results! #wordle#linguistics#computerscience#python♬ original sound - Chris

With all of that hard work in mind, according to all that data, the best first guess for Wordle is “later”.

Joining “later” in his top five were “alter”, “alert”, “arose” and then, finally, “irate”.

It’s not an airtight theory, though – as one commenter on Chris’ clip pointed out, “the “evaluation neglects the difference in the usefulness of yellow vs green, and how the word pairs up with a second guess”.

What popular game Wordle looks like.

Other users suggest “aisle” and “regal” are good starting points – and following them up with a word like “month” can put you in good stead.

As for the worst word you can start with, internet users and dedicated Wordle players think it could be “xylyl”.

Other ones to avoid include “gyppy”, “hyphy” and “yukky”.

That seems pretty self explanatory, considering it doesn’t even look like a real word, and very few words are spelled similar to it or use its letters in that order.