BLEAK
Yes, BLEAK was the Wordle answer on October 31, 2023 (Wordle #864).
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /bliːk/
- Adjective
-
Without color; pale; pallid.
- Adjective
-
Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds.
“a bleak and bare rock”
- Noun
-
A small European river fish (Alburnus alburnus), of the family Cyprinidae.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From Middle English bleke (also bleche, whence the English doublet bleach (“pale, bleak”)), and bleike (due to Old Norse), and earlier Middle English blak, blac (“pale, wan”), from Old English blǣc, blǣċ, blāc (“bleak, pale, pallid”) and Old Norse bleikr (“pale, whitish”), all from Proto-Germanic *blaikaz (“pale, shining”).
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
One syllable Say it BLEEK.
Rhymes with SPEAK GREEK CREEK FREAK SNEAK
Related meanings
Synonyms BLACK cutting raw bare STARK dim
Opposites hot hopeful
In a sentence
The economic situation is very bleak.
Where do you go when days are bleak?
Use BLEAK in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 91.7% of possible answers.
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: October 31, 2023 (#864).
See the full page for that puzzle: October 31, 2023 (#864).
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 BLEAK performs as a guess
BLEAK is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,384 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 82.5% of games, misses completely in 17.5%, and leaves about 198 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,609 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe BLEAK 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 BLEAK 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 BLEAK in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
BLEAK can come back 97 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 BLEAK; 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 BLEAK
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to BLEAK.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing BLEAK:
Research on BLEAK
Game-tree analysis and word research for BLEAK, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with BLEAK, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.73 guesses and ranks #6,817 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.85 guesses at best and is rank #2,688 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 3.73, 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.
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- BLEAK sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 3 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: 40 of 100. Raters gave it a middle-range score.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (3.4 of 5).
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); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).