Vowl · Strategy
Your Wordle opener is wrong here
Vowl uses the full Scrabble dictionary, and that one difference throws out most of the opening-word advice on the internet. The letter that matters most is the one Wordle trained you to ignore.
The S problem
Wordle's answers are curated. A person sat down and picked words that feel like words, and they left out plurals on purpose, because SPINS as a daily answer feels like a cheat. Vowl does not curate. Every legal ENABLE word of the right length can come up, which means 2,695 of the 8,636 possible five-letter answers end in S. That is 31.2 percent. It is not a quirk in the tail of the distribution, it is the single most predictable thing about any word you are chasing.
Put it next to the rest of the last slot and the shape of the problem is obvious. Across all 8,636 words the fifth letter is S 31.2 percent of the time, E 10.8, Y 10.5, D 6.7, R 6.1. Nothing else clears 5. One guess aimed at the fifth slot is worth more than one guess aimed anywhere else on the board.
What that does to openers
Here is the honest version of the calculation. Take an opening word, play it against all 8,636 possible answers, group those answers by the colour pattern they would produce, and count how many candidates you expect to still be holding afterwards. Lower is better. No sampling, no shortcuts, every word.
| Opener | Words left | Patterns | |
|---|---|---|---|
| tares | 195.9 | 202 | |
| rates | 201 | 186 | |
| saner | 205.8 | 173 | |
| tears | 225 | 195 | |
| raise | 225.7 | 166 | |
| stare | 242 | 168 | |
| snare | 243.6 | 168 | |
| slate | 247.3 | 184 | |
| arose | 252 | 153 | |
| aisle | 270.5 | 157 | |
| oater | 279.9 | 157 | |
| later | 283.2 | 170 |
TARES wins, and the three at the top share something CRANE and SLATE do not: they put a high value consonant in the fifth slot instead of a vowel. RAISE, the opener half the internet recommends, leaves you holding 226 words where TARES leaves 196. That is a 15 percent bigger haystack, every game, for the sake of one letter.
Look further down the same table and it gets worse for the popular picks. CRANE, which is the standard Wordle answer, comes in at 397. AUDIO, which people still recommend, leaves you 632 words, more than three times TARES. Both of them are optimised for a dictionary Vowl is not using.
Where the vowels actually live
The second letter is the vowel slot: A 17.1 percent, O 15.5, E 12.3, I 11.2, U 9.2. That is 65 percent of all words taking a vowel in slot two. The fourth letter is E almost 20 percent of the time and nothing else is close. Meanwhile 5,089 words hold exactly two vowels and only 36 hold none at all.
So the advice to burn a guess on vowels is solving a problem you do not have. You are going to hit vowels by accident. What you will not hit by accident is the consonant structure of the ending, and the ending is where the information is.
Which is also why ADIEU is a trap. It spends four of five letters confirming something the distribution already told you, tells you nothing about the fifth slot, and lands at 436 expected candidates. It also produces only 110 distinct colour patterns, the second worst number in the table, meaning it lumps huge groups of answers together and cannot tell them apart.
The part that stays true
None of this changes the basic idea behind a good opener, which is that you want a word whose feedback splits the dictionary into many small groups rather than a few big ones. That is what the patterns column is measuring. It just turns out that on a dictionary with plurals in it, the way to get that split is to cover the ending, and the way to cover the ending is S.
Full tables for four and six letter games are on the openers page, and the slot by slot letter counts are on letter frequency.