DrDamn Thought you would understand this by now. It’s about probability of hits. A bad starter word has infrequently used letters and even worse, double letters (wasting a letter). A good starter word uses frequently used letters. As the target word selection is essentially random, you want to maximise your hit % with frequently used letters. If you swap out an infrequently used letter for a frequent one, or remove a double, you improve your starter word. “Ready” is a better starter than “apple” and “plumb” because it covers more frequently used letters (e.g. “E”, the most frequent), more vowels (“y” as pseudo-vowel), frequent consonants (“r”, “d”). It’s essentially code breaking techniques, which focuses also on letter combos “ea”, “er”, “re”, “th”, “ph”, “ch” etc.