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Do you use the same opening word every time you play Wordle? Or do you pick a new word every day?
Whatever your preference, it's all in hopes of reaching the same conclusion: solving the five-letter puzzle in six tries or less. The New York Times has made that process a little bit easier by revealing what the best opening word is.
The New York Times has launched WordleBot, a new tool that analyzes your completed Wordle puzzle. It gives you scores for luck and skill and tells you what you could have done differently to solve the puzzle faster. Here's how it works:
Every Wordle game starts with one of 2,309 possible solutions as the hidden word. At each turn, WordleBot chooses the word that will allow it to solve the game in as few steps as possible, assuming any of the remaining solutions are equally likely. It keeps doing this until only one solution remains — the right answer.
With that being said, WordleBot found the best opening word is "CRANE" in normal mode and "DEALT" in hard mode. Hard mode can be toggled in the game's settings — it changes the rules to where any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses.
"This may surprise some readers, who have seen, in various places across the internet, people claim that words like IRATE, SALET or RAISE are the best openers. The truth is that it depends exactly how you’re playing and whether you are a human or a computer," the newspaper said.
Despite "CRANE" being the best opening word, it's never been a Wordle answer. Yet.