Your Wordle opener can have a bigger impact than you might think. While plenty of players stick with familiar starting words like “TRAIN” or “CLOSE,” relying on the same guess every day isn’t necessarily the most effective strategy. With years of Wordle data now available, we know that some letters appear far more frequently than others. Prioritizing common letters like E, A and R gives you a better chance of uncovering useful clues early, helping you solve the puzzle more efficiently instead of relying on habit or luck.

In order to get the absolute best starter words, you should know which letters turn up the most in English. I reached out to the big brains at the Oxford English Dictionary – you know, the whopping, multivolume dictionary that no one actually owns, but that your school librarian adored. An OED representative sent me a list prepared by staff that analyzed all the main entries in the concise version of the dictionary.

“It’s worth noting that the piece is pretty old,” the OED representative said apologetically. “It mentions that the stats are from Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2004, although current colleagues aren’t sure when the piece itself was written, and I’m afraid we don’t have any newer analysis of this sort.”

The list may be 22 years old, but I’m going with it. The alphabet isn’t like ice cream flavors or musical acts – no new, trendy letters have been introduced in that time. So whether you’re just getting into Wordle, or you want to shake up your starter words and make sure they’re still hitting the most common letters, this list is for you.

S begins the most English words

The most common letter is no surprise to most people: It’s E, and it’s immediately followed by another vowel, A. And those letters are much, much more popular than the final two letters in the OED’s list, which are J and Q. (Anyone else surprised that J is used less than X and Z?) 

“The letter E is over 56 times more common than Q in forming individual English words,” the OED analysis found. 

It notes that “there are more English words beginning with the letter S than with any other letter.”

So Wordle players, bookmark this article, and you might find yourself doing a little better in upcoming games. Here are the letters of the alphabet ranked according to how frequently they showed up in the 2004 Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

The most common letters used in English

1. E

2. A

3. R

4. I

5. O

6. T

7. N

8. S

9. L

10. C

11. U

12. D

13. P

14. M

15. H

16. G

17. B

18. F

19. Y

20. W

21. K

22. V

23. X

24. Z

25. J

26. Q

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line. See full bio