The best Wordle starting word has long been a subject of debate ever since the clever little word-guessing game exploded in popularity the best part of a year ago. But now owners The New York Times have declared a new officially recommended starting Wordle word, and I’m not sure how I feel about.
As spotted by The Verge, The New York Times’s official companion app WordleBot now presents players with a new recommended starting word: SLATE.
LEAST is another starting suggestion, if you’re playing on hard mode, but fundamentally you’re still working with the same five letters there, so I’m not really sure how helpful that is.
This isn’t the first time WordleBot has offered starter word suggestions, though. Previously, WordleBot’s initial starter word recommendation was CRANE, with DEALT for hard mode (which at least puts a few different letters into the mix), but with this week’s upgrade to WordleBot 2.0, it’s clear there’s a favourite five-letter combo in town.
I’ve long since stopped playing Wordle everyday – mostly because my family have slightly ruined it for me (don’t even get me started on the upcoming Wordle board game) – but I always usually opted for ‘STARE’ as my starter word, followed up by ‘CLOUD’ to knock out some more vowels.
In fairness, ‘STARE’ is only one letter different from ‘SLATE’, but surely R is a more commonly used letter than L? Even Wikipedia says so, so it must be true. Only by 1.9%, mind, but hey, maybe it’s also based on what words they’ve got coming up in their databanks? If they were simply going by the most frequently used letters in the English language, they’d be stuck with E, T, A, O and I, which… I dunno, is OATIE a word? Feels like it should be, but maybe that’s just because I’m hungry…
In any case, I’d be interested to know how many of you already use SLATE as your starting word, or, if you’ve got your own favourite, how different that is to the new official one.
And if you’re still trying to figure out today’s Wordle answer for August 22nd, then our guides team have got you covered with some hints to try and nudge you in the right direction.