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

BURGH

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

As an opener, it rules out about 86.6% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈbʌɹə//ˈbʌɹoʊ//bɝɡ/

Noun

a small mound, often used in reference to tumuli (mostly restricted to place names).

Noun

a borough or chartered town (now only used as an official subdivision in Scotland).

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 BURGH performs as a guess

Wordle accepts BURGH 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 69.7% of games, misses completely in 30.3%, and leaves about 319 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #7,775 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.72 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 BURGH 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.

4.09 Entropy (bits)
319 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
86.6% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 27% of evaluated openers
1.86 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How BURGH 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.

3.72 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#7,775 Rank among openers
Opening with BURGH solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.72 means those games clustered within about 0.72 of a guess of the 3.72 average. It ranks #7,775 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
58
3 guesses
845
4 guesses
1,174
5 guesses
260
6 guesses
17
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
1 vowels
Common:
RU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
70%
Green tile
26%
All gray
30%

Feedback distribution

BURGH can come back 94 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

719 answers
403 answers
136 answers
124 answers
89 answers
79 answers
71 answers
71 answers
63 answers
59 answers
50 answers
43 answers
38 answers
35 answers
32 answers
22 answers
19 answers
17 answers
17 answers
15 answers
13 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

B3U1R1G2H4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

Strategy after playing BURGH

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing BURGH:

30% chance
Suggested:
SALET
17% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL
6% chance
Suggested:
SAICE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

30.3%
SALET 6.26 bits
17.0%
ARIEL 5.14 bits
5.7%
SAICE 5.55 bits
5.2%
STONE 5.27 bits
3.7%
ALONE 5.42 bits
3.3%
CASTE 4.85 bits
3.0%
STILE 4.60 bits
3.0%
ALOSE 4.92 bits
2.7%
COATE 4.62 bits
2.5%
ALINE 4.63 bits

Research on BURGH

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

Optimal play

Opening with BURGH, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.76 guesses and ranks #8,746 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.89 guesses at best and is rank #3,992 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.72, at or below the proven-optimal 3.76, 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

One syllable Say it BURG. Estimated pronunciation

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

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, BURGH is a kind of borough.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
BURGH 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

Mary shows the old burgh to her aunt and uncle.
© tatoeba.org contributor Eccles17 (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 relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).