Why Five Letters?

Most Common English Letters

Most Common Letters In Wordle

Most Common Pairs

Best Starting Words

Our Favorite Starting Words

Users’ Favorite Starting Words

Lately, a particular word game known as Wordle has been all the rage online. If you haven’t heard the good word about Wordle, it’s a game created by and named after puzzle fan Josh Wardle that challenges you to name a particular five-letter word with only six guesses. With each guess, any letter that isn’t in the mystery word is shaded gray, a letter that is in the word (but was guessed in the wrong spot) is shaded yellow, and a correct letter in the right spot is shaded green. Land five greens, and you win!

Find the best words with Word Finder

If you’re STUCK in Wordle, and need a helping NUDGE, you can always rely on Word Finder! This tool—perfect for games like Scrabble™ and Wordle—should be in any word lover’s pocket, when the right word is just out of reach. Turn those yellow and black boxes into a row of green with just one quick search for that elusive 5-letter word.

This simple game has taken the internet by storm, largely due to how addictive it is to play and how easy it is to share your attempts on social media. Wordle can only be played once a day, and it keeps track of your winning streak and scores. Wardle has chalked up the game’s popularity to this once-a-day rule and the ease of sharing game results with friends.

It seems our users can’t get enough of Wordle either as Wordle answers have been among some of our top lookups recently! Some popularly searched Wordle words include knoll, youth, great, and gnome. With that in mind, we wanted to take a moment to share some popular Wordle strategies and a bunch of words that we and our users like to use as go-to moves in pursuit of Wordle success.

Why five letters?

In interviews, Josh Wardle hasn’t said specifically why he chose five letters. However, he and his partner narrowed it down from the “around 12,000” five-letter English words to 2,500 to use as the master list. It’s possible that the five-letter word goal (and Wordle itself) was inspired by the 1980s game show Lingo, which had very similar rules to Wordle.

Brush up on these spelling rules before the next round.

Most common letters in English

The exact numbers vary according to who measures and how, but the 15 most common English letters in order tend to be:

E

T

A

O

I

N

S

R

H

L

D

C

M

F

U

Unsurprisingly, Z, Q, J, and X consistently round out the bottom. As for the letters that begin the most English words, the top five are T, O, A, W, and B. For the end letter, the most common are E, S, T, D, and N.

Most common letters in Wordle

Our Wordle experts (we can call ourselves that, right?) here at Dictionary.com have put together a unique list of the most common letters appearing in Wordle so far (based on past answers).

Most common pairs

Which two letters go well together? According to letterfrequency.org, the 10 most common letter pairs are:

TH

HE

AN

IN

ER

ON

RE

ED

ND

HA

Why Five Letters?

Most Common English Letters

Most Common Letters In Wordle

Most Common Pairs

Best Starting Words

Our Favorite Starting Words

Users’ Favorite Starting Words

Lately, a particular word game known as Wordle has been all the rage online. If you haven’t heard the good word about Wordle, it’s a game created by and named after puzzle fan Josh Wardle that challenges you to name a particular five-letter word with only six guesses. With each guess, any letter that isn’t in the mystery word is shaded gray, a letter that is in the word (but was guessed in the wrong spot) is shaded yellow, and a correct letter in the right spot is shaded green. Land five greens, and you win!

Find the best words with Word Finder

If you’re STUCK in Wordle, and need a helping NUDGE, you can always rely on Word Finder! This tool—perfect for games like Scrabble™ and Wordle—should be in any word lover’s pocket, when the right word is just out of reach. Turn those yellow and black boxes into a row of green with just one quick search for that elusive 5-letter word.

This simple game has taken the internet by storm, largely due to how addictive it is to play and how easy it is to share your attempts on social media. Wordle can only be played once a day, and it keeps track of your winning streak and scores. Wardle has chalked up the game’s popularity to this once-a-day rule and the ease of sharing game results with friends.

It seems our users can’t get enough of Wordle either as Wordle answers have been among some of our top lookups recently! Some popularly searched Wordle words include knoll, youth, great, and gnome. With that in mind, we wanted to take a moment to share some popular Wordle strategies and a bunch of words that we and our users like to use as go-to moves in pursuit of Wordle success.

Why five letters?

In interviews, Josh Wardle hasn’t said specifically why he chose five letters. However, he and his partner narrowed it down from the “around 12,000” five-letter English words to 2,500 to use as the master list. It’s possible that the five-letter word goal (and Wordle itself) was inspired by the 1980s game show Lingo, which had very similar rules to Wordle.

Brush up on these spelling rules before the next round.

Most common letters in English

The exact numbers vary according to who measures and how, but the 15 most common English letters in order tend to be:

E

T

A

O

I

N

S

R

H

L

D

C

M

F

U

Unsurprisingly, Z, Q, J, and X consistently round out the bottom. As for the letters that begin the most English words, the top five are T, O, A, W, and B. For the end letter, the most common are E, S, T, D, and N.

Most common letters in Wordle

Our Wordle experts (we can call ourselves that, right?) here at Dictionary.com have put together a unique list of the most common letters appearing in Wordle so far (based on past answers).

Most common pairs

Which two letters go well together? According to letterfrequency.org, the 10 most common letter pairs are:

TH

HE

AN

IN

ER

ON

RE

ED

ND

HA

You can sign up for Frank Bruni’s weekly newsletter here: https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/frank-bruni?campaign_id=93&emc=edit_fb_20231221&instance_id=110704&nl=frank-bruni&regi_id=23311494&segment_id=153171&te=1&user_id=cbe959b84769cce84b806e9e75cb8180

For the Love of Sentences

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Kevin D. Williamson let it rip in a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal about how far American democracy has fallen. Here’s one whooshing stretch: “With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orban and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter.” (Thanks to Lisa Lee of Newton, Mass., and Emily Hawthorn of San Antonio for nominating this.)

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniel Drezner charted the hell of university leaders: “The primary job of any president or dean is fundraising, and some folks might be surprised at how hard it is to perform that task with any dignity or grace. The key thing to understand is that if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money.” (Lee Burdette Williams, Mystic, Conn.)

In The Times of London, James Marriott sang the praises of profanity. “Consider the force and versatility of ‘the f-word,’” he wrote, later adding: “Shouting it has been shown to reduce pain. It can be used as a verb, an adverb, a noun, an adjective, a modifier, an intensifier and an interjection. It is a valid exclamation of love, dismay, rage, astonishment, happiness, agony and grief. We are likely to hear it or to utter it at the greatest and the most tragic moments of our lives. A vulgar one-word sonnet.” (Jan Whitener, Washington, D.C.)

In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper weighed in on the debate over the importance of the humanities: “When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me — and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med — because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital.” (David Schulz, San Francisco)

At some point we will have to declare a moratorium on jokes about George Santos. But not yet. In The Washington Post, Herb Scribner and Anne Branigin wrote: “If we’ve learned anything about Santos — a serial fabulist who has told multiple falsehoods about his education history, religion and physical abilities — it’s that when life hands him lemons, he stuffs them into a Hermès bag filled with cash, or something.” (Katherine Mechner, Brooklyn, N.Y. )

Also in The Post, Matt Bai explained why the financial chicanery of Ron DeSantis’s sputtering presidential campaign matters: “Only entitled and selfish people cast aside the rules of society that inconvenience them, simply because they calculate that they can. A candidate who will gleefully ignore the campaign finance rules you find so arcane is exactly the kind of guy who will leave his dog poop on your lawn when you’re not home. ” (Michael Costa, Bristol, R.I., and Valerie Congdon, Waterford, Mich.)

In The Times, Alexis Soloski profiled the actor Matt Bomer: “I can confirm that if you are a person who enjoys the company of handsome men, it is very nice to sip herbal tea across the table from Bomer. He has dark hair, light eyes, a jaw so square it could be used for geometry tutorials. Wrap that up in an off-white turtleneck sweater, and it’s heartthrob city. I had mentioned to a few friends that I would be meeting him, and they all wanted me to ask the same question: How does it feel to be that handsome?” (Mike Silk, Laguna Woods, Calif.)

Also in The Times, Dwight Garner surveyed the tipsy joys and sober shortcomings of the new book “The World in a Wineglass,” by Ray Isle: “I would take his wine advice to the bank. What I would not do is take his new book out of the bookstore. It’s too heavy. It’s also too padded, like a student’s term paper. If it were an Easter basket, it would be 95 percent shredded green paper. You must really poke around to find the candy eggs.” (Seth Lloyd, Grosse Pointe, Mich.)

Share Capturing Voices

You can sign up for Frank Bruni’s weekly newsletter here: https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/frank-bruni?campaign_id=93&emc=edit_fb_20231221&instance_id=110704&nl=frank-bruni&regi_id=23311494&segment_id=153171&te=1&user_id=cbe959b84769cce84b806e9e75cb8180

For the Love of Sentences

Getty Images

Kevin D. Williamson let it rip in a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal about how far American democracy has fallen. Here’s one whooshing stretch: “With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orban and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter.” (Thanks to Lisa Lee of Newton, Mass., and Emily Hawthorn of San Antonio for nominating this.)

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniel Drezner charted the hell of university leaders: “The primary job of any president or dean is fundraising, and some folks might be surprised at how hard it is to perform that task with any dignity or grace. The key thing to understand is that if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money.” (Lee Burdette Williams, Mystic, Conn.)

In The Times of London, James Marriott sang the praises of profanity. “Consider the force and versatility of ‘the f-word,’” he wrote, later adding: “Shouting it has been shown to reduce pain. It can be used as a verb, an adverb, a noun, an adjective, a modifier, an intensifier and an interjection. It is a valid exclamation of love, dismay, rage, astonishment, happiness, agony and grief. We are likely to hear it or to utter it at the greatest and the most tragic moments of our lives. A vulgar one-word sonnet.” (Jan Whitener, Washington, D.C.)

In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper weighed in on the debate over the importance of the humanities: “When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me — and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med — because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital.” (David Schulz, San Francisco)

At some point we will have to declare a moratorium on jokes about George Santos. But not yet. In The Washington Post, Herb Scribner and Anne Branigin wrote: “If we’ve learned anything about Santos — a serial fabulist who has told multiple falsehoods about his education history, religion and physical abilities — it’s that when life hands him lemons, he stuffs them into a Hermès bag filled with cash, or something.” (Katherine Mechner, Brooklyn, N.Y. )

Also in The Post, Matt Bai explained why the financial chicanery of Ron DeSantis’s sputtering presidential campaign matters: “Only entitled and selfish people cast aside the rules of society that inconvenience them, simply because they calculate that they can. A candidate who will gleefully ignore the campaign finance rules you find so arcane is exactly the kind of guy who will leave his dog poop on your lawn when you’re not home. ” (Michael Costa, Bristol, R.I., and Valerie Congdon, Waterford, Mich.)

In The Times, Alexis Soloski profiled the actor Matt Bomer: “I can confirm that if you are a person who enjoys the company of handsome men, it is very nice to sip herbal tea across the table from Bomer. He has dark hair, light eyes, a jaw so square it could be used for geometry tutorials. Wrap that up in an off-white turtleneck sweater, and it’s heartthrob city. I had mentioned to a few friends that I would be meeting him, and they all wanted me to ask the same question: How does it feel to be that handsome?” (Mike Silk, Laguna Woods, Calif.)

Also in The Times, Dwight Garner surveyed the tipsy joys and sober shortcomings of the new book “The World in a Wineglass,” by Ray Isle: “I would take his wine advice to the bank. What I would not do is take his new book out of the bookstore. It’s too heavy. It’s also too padded, like a student’s term paper. If it were an Easter basket, it would be 95 percent shredded green paper. You must really poke around to find the candy eggs.” (Seth Lloyd, Grosse Pointe, Mich.)

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