The 50 Most Common Openers in Random Chat, Ranked by Reply Rate

The most common first message in random chat is a single letter: "m". In a sample of 239,068 chats on Ome.gg in October 2026, it opened about 41% of them, and it was one of the least successful openers we measured. The other person wrote back 39.5% of the time, and just 6% of chats that began with "m" turned into a real conversation.

A plain "hi" or "hey" does far better. Plain greetings got a reply 64.0% of the time and became a real conversation 20.6% of the time, about 3.4 times as often as "m". Here are the 50 most common openers, ranked, and what they tell you about starting a chat with a stranger.

Key findings

• Three lines open three in four chats: "m" (41%), the one-tap wave 👋 (25%) and "hi" (8.6%).
• Plain greetings such as "hi", "hey", "hello" and "yo" are the best common choice: a 64.0% reply rate and 20.6% real conversations.
• Announcing your gender costs you. "hi" got a reply 63.4% of the time; "hi m" got one 37.3% of the time.
• Stretching a greeting usually helps a little: "hi" 63.4%, "hii" 67.8%, "hiii" 69.2%, "hiiii" 69.9%.
• The wave is easy to answer (57.3%) but became a real conversation only 11.6% of the time, just over half the rate of a typed greeting.
• Open questions never make the top 50, because everyone words them differently. That's a point in their favour.

Two scores: a reply and a real conversation

Random matching on Ome.gg is text only, so the first message is the whole first impression. We scored each opener in two ways. The reply rate is how often the other person wrote anything back. A real conversation is stricter: both people went on to send at least three messages.

The list is ranked by reply rate, the first hurdle. But read the conversation column too: some lines get plenty of replies and almost never go anywhere.

A reply tells you that you got an answer. A real conversation tells you that you got a chat. The second is the one that counts.

The 50 most common openers, ranked by reply rate

These are the 50 first messages used most often between 17 and 22 October 2026, each sent by many different people, shown as they appear in the data. For comparison, the average reply rate across all first messages was 49.0%.

Which opener styles work best?

Grouping the lines by style makes the pattern easier to see. Between them, five styles make up close to nine in ten first messages, and the most popular style is the one least likely to become a conversation.

Plain greetings win on both scores. Gender-only lines, the most popular style by far, sit at or near the bottom on both.

Why does "m" do so badly?

"m" is shorthand for "male": the sender is saying they're a man. It's the most used opener by a wide margin. In the sample it opened 99,011 chats, more than any other line, and it came from thousands of different people.

The trouble is that it asks nothing. There's no question to answer and no topic to pick up. And because most people in Ome.gg's random chat are men, for most of the people who receive it, it isn't news. Only 39.5% wrote back, almost ten points below the average.

The variations do no better. "m here" (36.7%), "male" (35.5%) and "male here" (29.0%, the lowest in the top 50) all sit at the bottom of the table.

Does adding your gender to a greeting help?

No, and it's one of the clearest results in the data. The same greeting with an "m" attached loses between 26 and 30 points of reply rate:

• "hi" 63.4% → "hi m" 37.3%
• "hey" 64.2% → "hey m" 38.1%
• "hii" 67.8% → "hii m" 38.5%
• "heyy" 66.0% → "heyy m" 38.1%

Real conversations drop even more sharply. "hi" became one 19.3% of the time, "hi m" 7.3%. "hey" fell from 21.9% to 5.7% as "hey m". Putting the "m" first doesn't rescue it either: "m hi" got a reply 38.0% of the time. A greeting says "I'd like to talk"; the extra letter turns it into an announcement.

Do extra letters really help?

Mostly, yes. For the most common greetings, each extra letter nudged the reply rate up:

• "hi" 63.4% → "hii" 67.8% → "hiii" 69.2% → "hiiii" 69.9%
• "hey" 64.2% → "heyy" 66.0% → "heyyy" 67.7%
• "hello" 64.2% → "helloo" 66.7%
• "hy" 63.2% → "hyy" 71.1%

Every stretched version of "hi", "hey" and "hello" also beat the plain one on real conversations, though not in a neat line: "hiii" reached 28.3% against 19.3% for "hi". A stretched greeting reads as warmer and less automatic. The one exception is "yo": "yoo" (59.4%) and "yooo" (48.9%) both got fewer replies than "yo" (60.8%), so treat it as a nudge, not a rule.

What about the wave?

The 👋 is a one-tap opener Ome.gg offers at the start of a chat, and it's the second most common first message: a quarter of chats in the sample (25.1%) began with one. It does better than average on replies, at 57.3%.

Where it falls short is what comes next. Only 11.6% of chats that opened with a wave became a real conversation, just over half the rate of a typed greeting. A wave is easy to answer, but it leaves the next move open, and often neither person takes it. If you wave, have your second line ready.

Why do "f" and "age" rank so high?

"f" (for "female") tops the table, with a 73.0% reply rate and a 33.3% real-conversation rate, the highest of all 50. That isn't because it's a clever line. Most people in random chat here are men, so a line that signals a woman gets more replies. It says more about who is in the queue than about how to open.

So it isn't a tip anyone can copy, and you never need to state your gender to chat. Asking for it doesn't work well either: "f?" got a reply 46.9% of the time, below the average, and gender questions as a group became a real conversation only 8.1% of the time. A one-letter question gets a one-letter answer, and then the chat stalls.

"age" (64.5%) is a direct question, and questions ask to be answered. We'd still lead with something less personal: pushing for personal details is a poor start.

Do one-letter openers work?

For a reply, sometimes. For a conversation, rarely. "k", ".", "n" and "h" all made the top 50, and they still got answered between 40% and 61% of the time. But none became a real conversation more than 12% of the time, and "k", "." and "n" sat at around 7%.

The lesson is that a reply is cheap. Getting someone to type one word back is easy. Giving them something to say for the next five minutes is the hard part.

Where are the questions?

You might expect to see "how's your day going?" or "what are you listening to?" in a list like this. Open questions do turn up as first messages, but they're rare as exact lines, because everyone words them differently. A line has to be sent word for word by many different people to make this list, and open questions rarely are. That's a point in their favour: the person you meet hasn't seen yours a dozen times already.

Two of Ome.gg's suggested opener lines did make the list, and they show how much wording matters. "can't sleep either? 🌙" got a 55.3% reply rate and became a real conversation 20.4% of the time, about as often as a plain greeting. "late one! what's keeping you up?" got 38.5% and 6.4%. Both are about the same late-night moment; one is short and shared, the other asks for an explanation. Each was used by fewer than 100 people, so treat the gap as a hint rather than a rule.

How to write a better opener

Put together, the numbers point to a few simple habits. None of them needs a clever line.

1. Say hello, not your gender. A plain greeting gets a reply about 64% of the time; a gender-only opener about 39%. If the other person wants to know something about you, they'll ask.
2. Make it warm. A stretched "hii" or "heyy" did slightly better than the plain version on both scores. Friendliness comes through, even in three letters.
3. Have a second line ready. Even "hi" became a real conversation only 19.3% of the time, so four in five "hi" chats never got there. Your second message matters as much as your first.
4. Ask about the moment, not the person. A question about what they're doing, watching or listening to is easier to answer than "m or f?", and it gives them something to say back.
5. Lead with a shared interest. On Ome.gg you can pick interests and be matched with people who share them. If you do, mention it: it's ready-made common ground.
6. Skip the one-letter lines. "k", "." and "h" get replies, but they rarely lead anywhere.
7. Don't take silence personally. Even plain greetings went unanswered more than a third of the time. Skipping is how random chat works, and the next match is a tap away.

Our tips post on talking to strangers suggests skipping a bare "hi", and the numbers here agree in part. "hi" beats most common openers, but on its own it leaves the work to the other person; follow it quickly with a real question. For a wider view of how people use random chat, see our random chat report 2026, and if you're curious when the late-night crowd is online, see the busiest hours for random chat by country.

How we measured this

• Sample: 239,068 random chats on Ome.gg in which someone sent a first message, taken from 5 minutes of every hour between 17 and 22 October 2026. The data was read on 23 October 2026.
• Definitions: a chat is one random match between two strangers, and the opener is its first message. Reply rate: the other person wrote back. Real conversation: both people went on to send at least three messages.
• What was ranked: each distinct line counts separately, so "hi" and "hii" are separate entries. Only lines sent by many different people were ranked, so one person repeating the same line can't put it on the list.
• What was left out: spam, sexual lines, requests for contact details and any line containing an age. Scripted spam lines often get replies but almost never become conversations (around 1–2% do), so including them would have muddied the picture.
• Styles: the style figures (plain greetings, gender-only and so on) are totals over every line of that style in the sample, not just the lines in the top 50.
• Limitations: less than a week of data is a short window, and lines used by only a few dozen people can move several points with a handful of chats. The results describe Ome.gg's text chat, where most people are men; other sites may differ.
• Privacy: only aggregate counts were used. No person or conversation was looked at individually.

Next time you're matched with a stranger, try a friendly hello and a real question, and see where it goes. Start a chat on Ome.gg.