Accepted guess Not a possible answer C tier for first-turn info

BARFI

BARFI is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.

As an opener, it rules out about 91.8% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

An Indian dessert made from sweetened, condensed milk flavoured with fruit and spices.

Alternative forms: borfee, burfee, burfi

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

Yes

Included in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.

Possible answer

No

The solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.

Past Wordle answer

Not used yet

No past answer date found.

The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.

How BARFI performs as a guess

Wordle accepts BARFI as a guess, but the solver does not list it as a possible answer.

Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 82.1% of games, misses completely in 17.9%, and leaves about 194 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,352 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.73 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.

All gray? Tap a tile to cycle gray → yellow → green.

First-turn measures

All four describe BARFI 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.

4.43 Entropy (bits)
194 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
91.8% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 47% of evaluated openers
1.52 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How BARFI 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.

3.73 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#8,352 Rank among openers
Opening with BARFI left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.73 average. It ranks #8,352 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
44
3 guesses
834
4 guesses
1,203
5 guesses
261
6 guesses
10
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.46 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
AIR

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
27%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

BARFI can come back 78 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

426 answers
292 answers
260 answers
226 answers
149 answers
139 answers
104 answers
72 answers
61 answers
55 answers
45 answers
37 answers
28 answers
27 answers
23 answers
22 answers
22 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
12 answers
12 answers

Letter-value totals

Base letter-value totals for BARFI; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.

Scrabble

B3A1R1F4I1
Total: 10 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.

Strategy after playing BARFI

What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to BARFI.

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing BARFI:

18% chance
Suggested:
STOLE
12% chance
Suggested:
SIENT
11% chance
Suggested:
SLATE

Follow-ups for common patterns

Ranked follow-up guesses for the 10 most common feedback patterns.

17.9%
STOLE 5.93 bits
12.3%
SIENT 5.35 bits
11.0%
SLATE 5.73 bits
9.5%
TOUSE 5.28 bits
6.3%
STONE 4.51 bits
5.9%
TRACE 4.83 bits
4.4%
TRIED 4.47 bits
3.0%
SHONE 4.70 bits
2.6%
ANVIL 4.59 bits
2.3%
CLONE 4.69 bits

Research on BARFI

Game-tree analysis and word research for BARFI, with an explanation for each figure.

Optimal play

Opening with BARFI, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.75 guesses and ranks #8,069 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.87 guesses at best and is rank #3,536 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.73, at or below the proven-optimal 3.75, because the two figures score different answer lists.

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 BAHRFEE. Estimated pronunciation

This pronunciation is machine-estimated, not taken from a pronunciation dictionary.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
BARFI sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as an uncommon word many players still recognize.

In a sentence

When I first tried barfi, an East Indian sweet, I liked it.
© tatoeba.org contributor nonong (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).