Crane Is No Longer The Best Wordle Starting Word

I play Wordle every day and after each game I head over to The New York Times’ Wordle Bot page to get an analysis of my guessing game.

For as long as Wordle Bot has existed, the AI puzzle solver has recommended one word above any other as the best Wordle opening guess: Crane.

Crane has been the bot’s best guess for months—and subsequently the go-to opening salvo for countless Wordlers.

But all that changed with a new update to Wordle Bot that gives players even more data on their approach to solving each daily puzzle.

In the new update, crane has been replaced by slate. Slate is now the very best opening Wordle word out there, though both these words are highly effective openers.

Of course, I’ve always argued that with so many options, it’s just more fun to come up with something new every day. Sometimes that means you’ll get terrible results, but sometimes you can really narrow it down in just a single guess.

Whatever you choose to do with your Wordle opener, it appears ‘slate’ has taken the mantle long-held by ‘crane’ so you might want to reconsider your opening word. About 25% of all Wordle players use crane at this point in time. I’ll be curious to see how many of those stalwarts move on to slate.

In Hard Mode, least has become the best new opening word, replacing dealt.

The Wordle Bot 2.0 update has made some other important changes. Before the update, the bot would scold players for guessing a word that’s not one of the 2,309 possible Wordle solutions, even though people have no way of knowing that if they’re not cheating.

Now the Wordle Bot will consider those valid guesses and will analyze them accordingly. I suspect I will feel less resentment toward Wordle Bot going forward thanks to this update.