WordleBot Discovered the Ultimate First Word to Use

Hipster using a touch screen smart phone hands close up, vintage colors / Getty Images

Fan of the word game Wordle?

Hate it or love it, Wordle has become a runaway success, creating headlines when The New York Times purchased the game from the creator, Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle, in January 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.

A lot has changed since January, and the new team behind Wordle have developed a bot to help you play, aptly named WordleBot. The bot grades your daily performance, ranking it on an efficiency scale from 0 to 99. The teams research also discovered something else: the best opening word to play.

Dream? Freak? Skate? Moist?!

Nope, the optimal first word to play is “crane.” According to the developers, “WordleBot solves the 2,309 possible Wordles using the fewest number of guesses when it starts with CRANE in normal mode and DEALT in ‘hard mode.'”

Now you know and can impress family and friends with your newfound Wordle efficiency. Which word have you been using first?