Common Wordle Letters

What the common Wordle letters table measures

The common Wordle letters table describes this website's local list of common five-letter words. It does not describe every English word, every accepted Wordle guess, or the complete set of possible Wordle answers. Those collections serve different purposes and can produce different letter rankings. Treat the table as a starting point for exploring vocabulary, then use the feedback from your own puzzle to make a more specific decision.

The common-word count is a word count, not a count of individual letter appearances. A word contributes once if it contains the letter anywhere. For example, APPLE contributes one word to the count for P even though P occurs twice. This makes the column useful for asking how many words a letter could help distinguish, without giving repeated-letter words extra weight simply because they repeat a character.

Read count, share, weight, and position separately

Share expresses the common-word count as a percentage of the local sample, rounded to a whole number. Because one word contains several letters, the shares across the alphabet do not add up to one hundred percent. Rounding also means that letters with slightly different underlying counts can display the same percentage. Use the count column when you want to understand such a close comparison.

Local weight is a separate ranking input in the site's scoring system. The table is ordered by that weight, rather than being a live ranking of the share column. A high local weight is not a measured probability that a letter appears in today's answer. Keeping that distinction in mind prevents an easy mistake: reading a convenient scoring heuristic as if it were an official statistical forecast.

Best position is calculated from the five position counts in this same sample. It indicates the slot with the largest observed count for a letter. If two positions tie, the earlier position is kept. The table does not display the size of the gap between the winning position and the others, so a listed position should not be read as a strong advantage without looking at those underlying counts.

Use broad frequency before you have specific clues

At the beginning of a puzzle, a word with several distinct, common letters lets you investigate different parts of the alphabet. CRANE, for example, checks five different letters. That is a useful property to notice, but it does not make CRANE the best possible opener under every word list or solving goal. Another word may split a particular candidate pool more effectively.

An opener can pursue different goals. You might want a plausible answer immediately, broad coverage of unfamiliar letters, or a word that is easy to reason about after feedback arrives. Those goals can conflict. The table helps explain which letters your choice covers; it does not prove that a particular opener minimizes the average number of guesses. Avoid comparing two openers by adding rounded shares and calling the sum a win probability.

Rethink after the first result

Once you know a green letter, its position is fixed by the puzzle. A globally common alternative cannot replace it. A yellow letter is present but must move away from the position where it was tested. Gray feedback needs extra care when the same letter was guessed more than once, because a gray copy can limit the number of occurrences without excluding the letter entirely.

Suppose your clues fix the pattern S_A_E. At that point, the most useful question is which letters distinguish the words still compatible with that pattern. A letter that is frequent in the full sample may occur in every remaining candidate, making it useless as a new test. Another letter may be less common overall but separate the remaining choices. Your evidence has changed the population that matters.

Use the Wordle Helper to keep the clue constraints together. Apply each round only after checking its letters and colors. If the remaining results look implausible, inspect the entered feedback before assuming the frequency table is wrong. A single yellow letter accidentally marked green can remove a large part of the candidate set.

Repeated letters remain legitimate candidates

Testing five distinct letters can be helpful early, but it is not a rule that the answer must contain five distinct letters. Words such as APPLE contain a repeat. Do not remove repeat-letter candidates just because your opening strategy avoided repeats. The answer constraints come from the colored feedback, not from the style you used to choose your first guess.

When a guess contains two copies of a letter and only one receives positive feedback, record both observations. The positive tile establishes a required copy, while the gray copy may set an upper limit. Entering that situation as "exclude this letter everywhere" loses information and can create an empty result list. Our guide to Wordle repeated letters works through two examples tile by tile.

Check the source before drawing a stronger conclusion

A useful frequency claim should identify its dataset, counting method, denominator, and update process. This page's figures, and the ranking of common Wordle letters above, come from the common five-letter list used by this project. They are not a claim about the editorial choices of Wordle's publisher. The past-answers filter in the helper is a separate feature with its own source and coverage limits; it does not turn this frequency table into a live answer feed.

If a game's accepted vocabulary differs from the local list, follow the game's rules when choosing a guess. Compare candidate words in context, check definitions when an unfamiliar word appears, and distinguish an accepted guess from a likely answer. For broader opening-word discussion, see Best Starting Words for Wordle. For an active puzzle, return to the helper and let the actual clues narrow your next step.