Top 3 Wordle answer strategies to win fast – and 1 to avoid

Today's Wordle answer was a relatively easy one, but the answers aren't always so simple: check out our Wordle guide and archive for the evidence. But you can make even the most unforgiving Wordle puzzle a whole lot easier by adopting a few simple strategies, and by avoiding another. 

How to win at Wordle: start strong

It's important to get off to a strong start with a word containing a good mix of vowels and consonants. According to data analysis by Xan Gregg, "tales" is a great start –95% of humans who started with it were successful – or "crate" if you're a computer. Other experts recommend starting with as many vowels as possible. We find ALIEN or SHOUT are good starts.

How to win at Wordle: stay strong

You've started with a good strong word. Hopefully that's helped uncover part of the answer already. Now, you want to use another strong word but this time it should be as different as possible from the first one. That's because we're playing an elimination game here, so you don't want to use letters you already know aren't in the answer.

To stick with our own examples here, if we start with ALIEN we then use SHOUT, and vice-versa. That way we cover all the vowels and some of the most common consonants too.

How to win at Wordle: be patient

If you get a match with your first word, it's tempting to take a guess with the second – but the likelihood of getting it right is very, very low. Don't guess until you've deployed your second strong word: for example, if we'd used our ALIEN and SHOUT options on today's puzzle we'd know that H was in the right place and I, E and T were there but in other spots. That made the answer pretty clear.

How not to win at Wordle: use weird words

As much as ZEXES will annoy people in a game of Scrabble (it's the plural of Zex, a tool for cutting roof tiles), it's a terrible one for Wordle. It's terrible because as a guess it only contains a single vowel and two of its consonants are relatively uncommon. And it's terrible because Wordle doesn't use obscure words. I've just gone through the last three months of answers and there's not a single obscure word among them. That's part of its charm.