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

BUSKS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /bʌsks/

Noun

plural of busk

Verb

third-person singular simple present indicative of busk

Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.

In a sentence

Tom is in love with the woman who busks at the market.
© tatoeba.org contributor sundown (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use BUSKS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 74.5% of possible answers.

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

No completed appearance

No appearance in our globally completed history. A recent puzzle may still be live elsewhere.

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

How BUSKS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts BUSKS 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 52.9% of games, misses completely in 47.1%, and leaves about 607 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #13,999 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.90 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 BUSKS 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.

3.11 Entropy (bits)
607 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
74.5% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How BUSKS 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.

3.90 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.73 Spread of game lengths
#13,999 Rank among openers
Opening with BUSKS solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.73 means those games clustered within about 0.73 of a guess of the 3.90 average. It ranks #13,999 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
31
3 guesses
638
4 guesses
1,245
5 guesses
414
6 guesses
26

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
SU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
53%
Green tile
20%
All gray
47%

Feedback distribution

BUSKS can come back 57 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

1123 answers
347 answers
153 answers
110 answers
107 answers
74 answers
61 answers
58 answers
41 answers
37 answers
26 answers
21 answers
17 answers
15 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers
6 answers
5 answers
4 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

B3U1S1K5S1
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

Strategy after playing BUSKS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing BUSKS:

47% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL
15% chance
Suggested:
TIARE
6% chance
Suggested:
TRONE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

47.1% →
ARIEL 6.06 bits
14.6% →
TIARE 5.59 bits
6.4% →
TRONE 5.38 bits
4.6% →
LATER 4.43 bits
4.5% →
ARIEL 5.00 bits
3.1% →
CARLE 5.13 bits
2.6% →
LABOR 5.13 bits
2.4% →
STARE 4.32 bits
1.7% →
TRICE 3.97 bits
1.6% →
PATER 4.43 bits

Research on BUSKS

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

Optimal play

Opening with BUSKS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.92 guesses and ranks #14,132 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.06 guesses at best and is rank #6,837 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.90, at or below the proven-optimal 3.92, 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
BUSKS sits in the rare band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word few players will have met in print.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).