ABBEY
Yes, ABBEY was the Wordle answer on January 13, 2022 (Wordle #208).
As an opener, it rules out about 89.7% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈæb.i/
- Noun
-
The office or dominion of an abbot or abbess.
- Noun
-
A monastery or society of people, secluded from the world and devoted to religion and celibacy, which is headed by an abbot or abbess; also, the monastic building or buildings.
“From 1199 to 1203 William Punchard was the abbot of the abbey of Rievaulx, which was part of the Cistercian order of monks.”
Alternative forms: abby
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Wordle status
A word can be a playable guess without being a possible answer.
Playable guess
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
Used oncePast Wordle answer: January 13, 2022 (#208).
See the full page for that puzzle: January 13, 2022 (#208).
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
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See what the public sample says →How ABBEY performs as a guess
ABBEY is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,374 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 80.9% of games, misses completely in 19.1%, and leaves about 246 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #14,143 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.91 guesses in games solved within six turns.
Try your feedback pattern
Tap the tiles to match your feedback, then see the ranked follow-up guesses.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe ABBEY used as an opening guess. Entropy is the same idea as “avg ruled out” on a log scale: a higher number means the guess splits the possible answers into more, smaller groups.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How ABBEY performed in the previous complete opener benchmark, against its captured answer snapshot. These research figures are separate from today's solver recommendations. See the data page for the method.
Composition
Feedback chances
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches ABBEY in 3 guesses.
Feedback distribution
ABBEY can come back 66 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for ABBEY; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
Try next
Strategy after playing ABBEY
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to ABBEY.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing ABBEY:
Research on ABBEY
Game-tree analysis and word research for ABBEY, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with ABBEY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.87 guesses and ranks #13,153 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
No guaranteed hard-mode solve In hard mode, no strategy that opens with ABBEY can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.91; proven optimal play reaches 3.87. The fixed strategy accounts for the difference.
These figures come from exhaustive game-tree search and are exact for the NYT lists of July 2023 (3,158 answers). They do not use the site's working answer pool.
How it sounds
Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it ABEE.
Related meanings
In WordNet's sense inventory, ABBEY is a kind of church or convent.
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- ABBEY sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 8 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Age of acquisition
- Typically learned around age 10, by Glasgow Norms speaker ratings.
- Imageability
- Imageability score: 72 of 100. Raters found it easy to picture.
In a sentence
There used to be an abbey here.
Why are they selling the abbey?
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Glasgow Norms (CC BY 4.0).