BOTES
BOTES is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.
As an opener, it rules out about 94.5% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
- Noun
-
plural of bote
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
NoThe solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.
Past Wordle answer
Not used yetNo past answer date found.
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
Wordle Observatory
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How BOTES performs as a guess
Wordle accepts BOTES 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 86.2% of games, misses completely in 13.8%, and leaves about 129 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #4,009 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.65 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 BOTES 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 BOTES 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
Feedback distribution
BOTES can come back 99 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing BOTES:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for BOTES; 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.
The science of BOTES
What game-tree analysis and word research measure about BOTES — each figure with what it means.
Optimal play
Opening with BOTES, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.65 guesses — rank #1,495 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 BOTES can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.65; proven optimal play reaches 3.65 — the gap is the price of a fixed strategy.
These figures come from exhaustive game-tree search and are exact for the NYT lists of July 2023 (3,158 answers) — not the site's working answer pool.
How it sounds
One syllable — say it BOHTS. Estimated pronunciation
This pronunciation is machine-estimated, not taken from a pronunciation dictionary.
How people know it
- Frequency
- BOTES sits in the rare band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English — a word few players will have met in print.
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).