Getting vowels is good, but I thought maybe it would work better to have 5 common letters in positions where they commonly occur in words. The I and O in ratio are not often in those positions.
But it’s also true that the optimal start is probably different depending whether your objective is to solve it as quickly as possible, or to never fail to solve it in the allowed number of guesses.
Tomorrow I think I’ll try starting with ADIEU to see if that’s in its word list and knock four vowels out.
I suspect it’s possible to write some code to find the absolute best starting word that splits up the search tree well enough to yield a 2-guess solution pretty often and 3-guess path 100% of the time or nearly so. The words mentioned so far are good candidates for that word, but there might be a particular word that’s more likely to reveal letters in the correct placement as well as merely being somewhere in the solution.
EDIT: ninja’d by Riemann,
I think the optimal start will turn out to be the same word for both objectives.
From Wheel of Fortune, in the final puzzle they give the contestant R S T L N and E. Because of that my starting word has always (well, for 3 days) been TREND. Maybe a better start word would be STERN.
Possibly so, but remember that Wheel of Fortune adds artificial constraints to restrict vowel guesses. I’m sure that final game allows just that single vowel to make things harder on purpose, not easier.
In addition, WoF answers aren’t just a five letter word without repeats.
If you had repeated letters as an option, you would need more than 5 guesses.
Maybe more than 6.
Today’s word had a repeated letter. If I’d known repeated letters were possible, I might not have gone down the garden path, but maybe I still would have.
Today’s answer is FERRY.
And here were my guesses that resulted in a loss:
ADIEU
RENTS
PERCH
DERBY
JERKY
GERMY
I don’t like this game as much anymore.
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That’s my post; hope you liked it!
And I just saw that I goofed and tried to reuse a letter that had already been ruled out. Oh well. I’m pretty sure that the next word I used after the goof would have been my next choice, regardless. But after the fifth word I might have been really stuck for what to try next.
Here on the west coast I don’t have that word yet. It will change at midnight.
I shouldn’t have revealed those spoilers!
My progress in today’s puzzle was slowed down because I didn’t know duplicate letters were allowed.
^ same
RATED
SNORE
EVERY
BERRY
MERRY
FERRY
After 3 guesses, it had to end -ERRY, and I felt stupid for first guessing BERRY when I realized it had to be the Christmas theme with MERRY…right?
BRAKE
RENTS
MERGE
HERTZ
PERVY
FERRY
Disappointed that the answer was not PERVY
I also tried LEROY
mmm
SWEAT
CHOIR
PLUME
BENDY
JERKY—I really thought this was it.
That left me with _ER_Y known and correct. Leaving QFGZXV as unused letters. I couldn’t make any of that work and realized there must be a repeated letter
and got the correct answer from there.
Got it in 3 today!
I got very lucky with my first and second guess, so when it came to the third guess it was somewhat obvious that there had to be a repeated letter. None of the other remaining letters in the alphabet worked in the third position of the word.
Same here - I had the last four letters after my first three words, then it took me three more turns to get the correct first letter. 
That was the info I needed. I had about concluded that they must have screwed up,
ETA I can’t seem to get a second spoiler in this post, so removing the rest of it instead.
I had guessed ferny before figuring out it was ferry.
I don’t like the double letters. This UI is not set up to accommodate them. There should be another color if you guess a letter that has another space, like make it half green, half yellow so that you now that the letter is in the correct place but there should be another one in another space. When you guess a letter and it’s green, but it is supposed to appear again elsewhere, that’s extremely misleading. Either they need to indicate that situation better, or disallow words with repeated letters.
Agreed. I’m currently musing over how I will code this game myself in a different environment and I’m leaning toward the latter option.