Wordle Starter Words for Dangerous Troublemakers

Let’s see if we can make Wordlebot cry.

It’s widely known that those incurable squares over at Wordle have never had a minute of fun in their entire lives. This is why Wordlebot (the New York Times’s constipated bureaucrat of a Wordle analyzer) recommends that prospective Wordlers choose their starter words from the feckless trio of CRANE, SLATE, and CRATE—respectively, history’s dullest long-necked bird, a tablet that old, dead people used to do their Geometry homework on, and a box to store all your dreams of color and light in the attic where they can’t get out.

Wordlebot gives each of these soporific dullards a 99 out of a possible 99 points if you use it as a starter (how convenient that Wordlebot’s own favorite words to open with should garner such a high score!), and if your goal is to please the moth-eaten automatons who staff the Wordle desk of the New York Times, you’d better paint within the rigid lines that they’ve laid out for you or prepare to suffer the consequences. But if you are willing to shun the prudish dogma of the Wordle intelligentsia and bask in the light of nature, a whole glorious world of illicit five-letter starter words will be revealed to you, and you can soar on their exquisite currents like a scarlet ibis (history’s most interesting long-necked bird) and dance the Wordle dance…