I pulled every Wordle answer published from 19 June 2021 to 5 December 2026 — 1,994 of them — and ran some analysis on the dataset. The results are more interesting than I expected, and a couple of them contradict things people say about Wordle with a lot of confidence.
Everything below is computed from that list. The full dataset and charts are here: https://anywordsolver.com/wordle-answer-statistics.html
The dataset
- 1,994 answers, 19 June 2021 → 5 December 2026
- 9,970 letters in total
- Every answer is a real five-letter word
Letter frequency
| Letter | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| E | 1,080 | 10.83% |
| A | 848 | 8.51% |
| R | 764 | 7.66% |
| O | 670 | 6.72% |
| T | 649 | 6.51% |
| L | 615 | 6.17% |
| I | 568 | 5.70% |
| S | 562 | 5.64% |
| N | 503 | 5.05% |
| C | 412 | 4.13% |
| U | 397 | 3.98% |
| H | 344 | 3.45% |
| D | 337 | 3.38% |
| Y | 331 | 3.32% |
| P | 309 | 3.10% |
| M | 274 | 2.75% |
| G | 267 | 2.68% |
| B | 237 | 2.38% |
| F | 197 | 1.98% |
| K | 183 | 1.84% |
| W | 165 | 1.65% |
| V | 135 | 1.35% |
| Z | 38 | 0.38% |
| X | 34 | 0.34% |
| Q | 28 | 0.28% |
| J | 23 | 0.23% |
E and A together account for nearly a fifth of every letter Wordle has ever used.
Where answers start
| First letter | Answers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| S | 300 | 15.05% |
| C | 171 | 8.58% |
| B | 150 | 7.52% |
| T | 132 | 6.62% |
| A | 126 | 6.32% |
X has never once started an answer. Zero out of 1,994.
Where answers end
| Last letter | Answers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| E | 395 | 19.81% |
| Y | 285 | 14.29% |
| T | 225 | 11.28% |
| R | 169 | 8.48% |
| L | 139 | 6.97% |
Nearly one answer in five ends in E. If you have one guess left and a green tile on position 4, the answer is very likely to end in E.
The findings that surprised me
1. "Wordle never repeats words" is not true
There are 1,962 distinct words across 1,994 answers. 32 words have been used more than once. The first repeat was puzzle #1690, on 2 February 2026, and the word was CIGAR — the same word that opened the game in June 2021.
The full list of recycled words: ACUTE, AGREE, AWAKE, BATON, BLURT, BREAK, BRING, CIGAR, CLICK, CLOCK, COMET, FEIGN, FIRST, FLUME, FOCUS, FORTH, GRADE, GRIPE, IVORY, LINEN, MAJOR, MOTOR, PROVE, SANDY, SMILE, SPICY, SQUAD, STAND, STINK, STOUT, THUMB, TRACE.
The idea that answers never repeat is a reasonable mental model until you check the data, and then you find out it was true for the first 1,689 puzzles and quietly stopped being true.
2. A third of answers have a repeated letter
619 answers (31.0%) contain at least one repeated letter. There are 633 double-letter occurrences and 14 triples.
This is why a first guess with five distinct letters is slightly more informative than one with a repeated letter, even if the repeated letter would otherwise be useful.
3. Vowel counts are remarkably consistent
| Vowels | Answers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 8 | 0.4% |
| 1 | 620 | 31.1% |
| 2 | 1,158 | 58.1% |
| 3 | 205 | 10.3% |
| 4 | 3 | 0.2% |
Nearly six in ten answers have exactly two vowels. Only eight answers in the entire history have none — and only three have four.
4. The common endings are highly concentrated
The three most common final letter sequences are LLY (16), ING (16) and TCH (15), followed by TER, ATE, VER, ILL, OUT, ONE and ASH.
That list is a small cheat sheet. A word ending in -ING or -TER is far more likely than a random five-letter string.
The hardest answers
Here is where I have to be careful. There is no official Wordle difficulty rating, so I built a proxy: rare letters (J, Q, X, Z) are weighted heavily, a repeated letter adds difficulty, and very low vowel counts add more. It is my scoring function, not Wordle's data, and the page says the same thing.
The top of that ranking:
- JAZZY (score 12) — two Zs, no common letters
- TIZZY, FUZZY, FIZZY, DIZZY (9)
- PIZZA (8)
- JOLLY, JIFFY, JELLY (6)
- WOOZY, QUILL, QUEUE, QUELL, QUEER, QUEEN (5)
The JAZZY cluster is not a coincidence. A double Z, a double Y and a double F are the three rarest patterns in English five-letter words, so of course they cluster at the top.
Why I built solvers next to the data
While I was in the data, I also wrote three free solvers:
- Chainword solver — give it a tile rack, get every valid chain where each word starts with the previous word's last letter
- Clueword solver — reverse Wordle: enter the coloured clue rows, get every word consistent with all of them (including the duplicate-letter rule, which is where most naive solvers break)
- Squareword solver — complete a 4×4 grid so that every row and every column is a real word
All three are client-side JavaScript, no account, no ads on the tools.
Try it yourself
The solvers and the full analysis are free, with no sign-up:
- Wordle answer statistics: https://anywordsolver.com/wordle-answer-statistics.html
- Full answer archive: https://anywordsolver.com/wordle-answer-archive.html
I would genuinely like to know whether X has never opened an answer in other people's datasets too, or whether that is specific to how this answer list was curated. If you have run the same analysis on a different source, I am curious how the numbers compare.
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