E, A, R, O, and T are the most common letters in Wordle answers, calculated directly from every unique word that has ever been used. E alone appears in nearly half of all answers. Position matters too: S dominates the first letter, while E dominates the last.
Which letters are the most common in Wordle answers?
Rather than repeat a generic English-language letter frequency chart, this data is calculated directly from the 1888 unique words that have actually served as a Wordle answer, using the same archive behind our full historical answer list. Each row counts the number of answers that contain that letter at least once, not the raw number of times it appears.
| Rank | Letter | Answers containing it | Share of all answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | E | 886 | 46.9% |
| 2 | A | 753 | 39.9% |
| 3 | R | 684 | 36.2% |
| 4 | O | 569 | 30.1% |
| 5 | T | 561 | 29.7% |
| 6 | L | 533 | 28.2% |
| 7 | I | 525 | 27.8% |
| 8 | S | 479 | 25.4% |
| 9 | N | 453 | 24.0% |
| 10 | U | 370 | 19.6% |
E's lead is decisive — it shows up in nearly half of every answer ever used, well ahead of A in second place. That gap is exactly why openers built around E and A (CRANE, SLATE, TRACE, ADIEU) test high-value letters immediately, even before considering which specific consonants they pair them with.
How many vowels does a typical Wordle answer have?
Vowels account for about 35.8%of every letter slot across all answers, meaning the typical five-letter Wordle answer carries roughly one and a half to two vowels. Every valid answer has at least one vowel — a five-letter word with zero vowels is vanishingly rare in English and doesn't appear in the curated Wordle list at all.
That leaves consonants doing most of the distinguishing work. Once a guess has confirmed which vowels are present, the remaining candidate pool is usually narrowed far more by testing high-frequency consonants like R, S, T, L, and N than by testing additional vowels — which is the same principle covered in our Wordle analyzer guideunder “the vowel fallacy.”
What are the rarest letters in Wordle answers?
| Letter | Answers containing it | Share of all answers |
|---|---|---|
| J | 22 | 1.17% |
| Q | 27 | 1.43% |
| Z | 30 | 1.59% |
| X | 33 | 1.75% |
| V | 126 | 6.67% |
| W | 155 | 8.21% |
J, Q, and Z each show up in under 2% of all answers, and X isn't far ahead. These letters aren't excluded — words like JOLLY, QUAKE, and BUZZY have all appeared — but they're rare enough that opening with a word built around one is almost always a weaker first move than testing a top-10 letter instead.
Does letter frequency change by tile position?
Yes, substantially. Grouping the same 1888 answers by which letter lands in each of the five positions shows a clearly different leader at almost every slot:
| Position | Top 3 letters |
|---|---|
| Letter 1 | S, C, B |
| Letter 2 | O, A, R |
| Letter 3 | A, O, I |
| Letter 4 | E, N, I |
| Letter 5 | E, Y, T |
S dominates the first position by a wide margin — a huge share of common five-letter words simply start with S. The middle three positions lean vowel-heavy, with O and A both showing up as leaders in positions 2 and 3. The last position swings back to consonants and E, reflecting how many English words end in a hard consonant sound or a trailing E or Y.
How does this compare to general English letter frequency?
Linguists and typesetters have long summarized English letter frequency with the shorthand “ETAOIN SHRDLU” — the roughly descending order of how often each letter appears across written English as a whole. Wordle's answer data tracks that shorthand loosely but not exactly: E and T both rank near the top in both lists, but A and R climb higher in Wordle's five-letter answer pool than they do in general English, while common short-word letters like N and the very frequent S shift position once every word is forced to be exactly five letters long.
That gap exists because general English frequency counts every word of every length, weighted by how often each word is actually used in speech and writing — short function words like “the,” “a,” and “of” dominate that count. Wordle's answer list ignores word frequency in everyday use entirely and ignores every word length except five, which is exactly why S can dominate Wordle's first-letter position so heavily despite not topping general English frequency charts at all — it's a reflection of which five-letter words exist and read as fair answers, not of which letters people type most.
What does this mean for choosing a starting word?
A strong opener isn't just built from high-frequency letters — it's built from high-frequency letters placed where they're statistically likely to matter. A word like SLATE tests S in the position it dominates, a vowel in the early-middle positions where vowels cluster, and T and E near the end where both are strong. That's a large part of why data-driven openers consistently outperform vowel-heavy words like ADIEU, which test four vowels but skip the position-specific consonant signal entirely.
For a full ranked comparison of specific opening words against this same kind of data, see our best Wordle starting words guide, or work through the entropy-based reasoning in our Wordle analyzer guide for how to apply this letter data turn by turn.