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

BUTOH

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

A form of Japanese contemporary dance.

Noun

Penis

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

Etymology

From Japanese 舞踏 (butō). The trailing “h” is to indicate the pronunciation; compare bokeh.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use BUTOH in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 88.9% 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 BUTOH performs as a guess

Wordle accepts BUTOH 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 72.2% of games, misses completely in 27.8%, and leaves about 265 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #6,791 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.70 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 BUTOH 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.

4.35 Entropy (bits)
265 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
88.9% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How BUTOH 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.

3.70 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#6,791 Rank among openers
Opening with BUTOH left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.72 means those games clustered within about 0.72 of a guess of the 3.70 average. It ranks #6,791 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
60
3 guesses
871
4 guesses
1,162
5 guesses
238
6 guesses
22

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
OTU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
72%
Green tile
28%
All gray
28%

Feedback distribution

BUTOH can come back 99 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

662 answers
265 answers
244 answers
103 answers
102 answers
98 answers
76 answers
74 answers
68 answers
49 answers
49 answers
44 answers
40 answers
36 answers
35 answers
31 answers
24 answers
21 answers
20 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

B3U1T1O1H4
Total: 10 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing BUTOH

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing BUTOH:

28% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
11% chance
Suggested:
DROLE
10% chance
Suggested:
REAST

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

27.8% →
RAILE 6.22 bits
11.1% →
DROLE 5.17 bits
10.2% →
REAST 5.61 bits
4.3% →
SACRE 5.30 bits
4.3% →
SLANE 5.14 bits
4.1% →
SILER 4.60 bits
3.2% →
PALER 4.65 bits
3.1% →
SLANE 5.08 bits
2.9% →
TARSE 4.52 bits
2.1% →
EARLY 4.79 bits

Research on BUTOH

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

Optimal play

Opening with BUTOH, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.73 guesses and ranks #7,147 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.86 guesses at best and is rank #3,214 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.70, 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
BUTOH 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).