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

CHANG

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

A traditional harp of central and southwest Asia

Alternative forms: çeng

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

Etymology

From the Wade-Giles romanization of Mandarin 張/张 (Zhāng) Wade-Giles romanization: Chang¹. Doublet of Teo.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

How it sounds

One syllable Say it CHANG.

Rhymes with SLANG LIANG THANG CLANG STANG

In a sentence

Chang says drinkers in Taiwan find the whiskies from Scotland to be more exotic.
© tatoeba.org contributor Cangarejo (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use CHANG in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 90.1% 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 CHANG performs as a guess

Wordle accepts CHANG 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 74.4% of games, misses completely in 25.6%, and leaves about 237 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #4,941 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.67 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 CHANG 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.

4.46 Entropy (bits)
237 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
90.1% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How CHANG 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.

3.67 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#4,941 Rank among openers
Opening with CHANG solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.68 means those games clustered within about 0.68 of a guess of the 3.67 average. It ranks #4,941 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
52
3 guesses
898
4 guesses
1,196
5 guesses
193
6 guesses
15

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
AN

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
74%
Green tile
29%
All gray
26%

Feedback distribution

CHANG can come back 87 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

611 answers
314 answers
151 answers
125 answers
107 answers
83 answers
77 answers
70 answers
69 answers
66 answers
53 answers
43 answers
34 answers
34 answers
30 answers
28 answers
27 answers
26 answers
25 answers
22 answers
22 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
20 answers
19 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

C3H4A1N1G2
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

Strategy after playing CHANG

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing CHANG:

26% chance
Suggested:
SOLER
13% chance
Suggested:
TALER
6% chance
Suggested:
SIREN

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

25.6% →
SOLER 6.00 bits
13.2% →
TALER 5.64 bits
6.3% →
SIREN 5.22 bits
5.2% →
STIRE 5.20 bits
4.5% →
ROULE 5.26 bits
3.5% →
STIRE 5.11 bits
3.2% →
TORSE 5.09 bits
2.9% →
RATEL 4.58 bits
2.9% →
TOILE 4.88 bits
2.8% →
RUOTE 4.76 bits

Research on CHANG

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

Optimal play

Opening with CHANG, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.72 guesses and ranks #5,941 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.83 guesses at best and is rank #2,343 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.67, at or below the proven-optimal 3.72, 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
CHANG sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 5 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.

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