The best starting words for Sedecordle
The best single starting word for Sedecordle is AROSE: played against every possible answer, it lights up 1.75 green or yellow tiles on an average board. The strongest opening plan, though, is a set of four words such as AROSE, UNLIT, DUCHY, GIMPY, which together cover 17 different letters before you aim at a single board.
We didn't pick these from memory. We took the 2,779 five-letter answers that the game can choose from, counted how often each letter turns up, and played the best candidates against every one of those answers. This article shows the results and how to use them.
Why openers matter more with 16 boards
In ordinary Wordle a weak first guess costs you one row out of six. In Sedecordle your first guess lands on sixteen boards at once, so a good opener earns sixteen times the information. You have 21 guesses for 16 words, which leaves just five spare guesses for the whole game. Those five are your budget for opening moves and mistakes combined.
That is why experienced players spend three or four guesses on fixed openers before they try to solve anything. Each opener colors tiles on every board, and after four of them most boards are down to one or two possible words. You can read more about turning that information into solved boards in our strategy guide.
Which letters show up most
Common letters give you the most colored tiles, so the first step is a letter count. This table shows the share of answers that contain each letter at least once:
| Rank | Letter | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | E | 44% |
| 2 | A | 40% |
| 3 | R | 34% |
| 4 | O | 30% |
| 5 | T | 28% |
| 6 | I | 27% |
| 7 | S | 27% |
| 8 | L | 26% |
| 9 | N | 24% |
| 10 | U | 20% |
E is in 44% of all answers, so almost every good opener contains it. Vowels and a handful of consonants such as R, S, T and L do most of the work; rare letters like Q, J, X and Z are better left for later guesses, when you already know which boards need them.
The best single starting words
To rank openers we took the 150 words with the best letter coverage and played each one against all 2,779 answers. "Colored tiles" is the average number of green or yellow tiles the word earns on one board, and "green tiles" is how many of those are in the right spot:
| Rank | Word | Colored tiles | Green tiles |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AROSE | 1.75 | 0.51 |
| 2 | IRATE | 1.74 | 0.47 |
| 3 | ASTER | 1.73 | 0.33 |
| 4 | STARE | 1.73 | 0.54 |
| 5 | TASER | 1.73 | 0.47 |
| 6 | ALERT | 1.73 | 0.37 |
| 7 | ALTER | 1.73 | 0.40 |
| 8 | ARISE | 1.73 | 0.51 |
The differences at the top are small, so pick the one you find easiest to remember. A word with more green tiles is slightly better when you plan to solve boards early; a word with more colored tiles is better when you plan to play several openers first.
A four-word opening set
One opener is never enough for sixteen boards. The set below was built greedily: each word adds the most common letters that the earlier words haven't covered yet, and no word repeats a letter of its own.
| Guess | Word | Letters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AROSE | A R O S E |
| 2 | UNLIT | U N L I T |
| 3 | DUCHY | D U C H Y |
| 4 | GIMPY | G I M P Y |
After these four guesses, an average answer has 4.1 of its letters revealed as green or yellow, and 98% of all answers have at least three letters revealed. On most boards that is enough to name the word straight away.
Typing the same four words every day sounds dull, but it makes the next step faster: you learn how the colors of your set look for common patterns, and you read the boards in seconds.
When to break away from your set
Fixed openers are a plan, not a rule. Stop early when a board is already solved by chance, or when your first two guesses have revealed almost every letter on most boards. Every guess you save goes into the spare budget, and you will be glad of it in the last few rows.
Hard mode changes things slightly: every guess must still fit at least one unsolved board, so a fixed set only works if each word stays possible on some board. In practice the first two words almost always do, and you can switch to solving earlier.
Try it yourself
The fastest way to learn an opening set is to use it. Play a few rounds in practice mode, where nothing counts toward your streak, and then take your set into the daily puzzle. If you get stuck on a board, the daily answers page gives hints one step at a time instead of spoiling every word.