Wordle, I love you and I hate you. I’ve fallen into the trap of having to guess the same words over and over again when I play Wordle. I like to start with TRAIN, then move on to CLOSE, then DUMPY, and sometimes the weird word WHELK after that. I chose these words strategically because I know which letters are more popular than others.
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To get the absolute best starter words, you need to know which letters are most common in English. I contacted the big brains of the Oxford English Dictionary — you know, the huge, multi-volume dictionary that no one actually owns but your school librarian loved. An OED representative sent me a list in which the staff analyzed all the major entries in the short version of the dictionary.
“It is worth noting that the piece is quite old,” the OED representative said apologetically. “The statistics are stated to be from the 2004 Concise Oxford English Dictionary, although current colleagues are unsure when the piece itself was written, and I’m afraid we have no newer analysis of this kind.”
The list may be 22 years old, but I agree. The alphabet is not like ice cream flavors or musical acts; no new, trendy letters were introduced during that time. So whether you’re just getting started with Wordle, or want to shake up your starter words and make sure they still contain the most common letters, this list is for you.
S starts with 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 last two letters in the OED list, namely J and Q. (Is anyone else surprised that J is used less than X and Z?)
“The letter E is more than 56 times more common than Q in forming individual English words,” the OED analysis found.
It notes that “there are more English words that start with the letter S than any other letter.”
So Wordle players, bookmark this article, and you might just find yourself doing a little better in the games to come. Here the letters of the alphabet are arranged according to how often they appeared in the 2004 Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
The most common letters used in English
E
A
R
I
O
T
N
S
L
c
YOU
D
P
M
H
G
b
F
Y
W
K
V
X
Z
J
Q
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