CIVIC
Yes, CIVIC was the Wordle answer on September 23, 2021 (Wordle #96).
As an opener, it rules out about 68.5% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈsɪvɪk/
- Adjective
-
Of, relating to, or belonging to a city, a citizen, or citizenship; municipal or civil.
“Thousands of people came to the Civic Center to show off their civic pride.”
- Adjective
-
Of or relating to the citizen, or of good citizenship and its rights and duties.
“civic duty”
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
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
Used oncePast Wordle answer: September 23, 2021 (#96).
See the full page for that puzzle: September 23, 2021 (#96).
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
Wordle Observatory · optional
Played this Wordle?
Add your result to the public totals · about 20 seconds
Wordle Observatory · optional
Played this Wordle?
Add your result to the public totals · about 20 seconds
Add your result and a quick difficulty rating to help explain how this puzzle played.
See the public dataThank you. Your result now helps describe this puzzle.
See what the public sample says →How CIVIC performs as a guess
CIVIC is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,374 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 46.2% of games, misses completely in 53.8%, and leaves about 749 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #14,745 of 14,855 openers, averaging 4.03 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 CIVIC 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 CIVIC 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
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches CIVIC in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
CIVIC can come back 46 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for CIVIC; 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.
Try next
Strategy after playing CIVIC
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to CIVIC.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing CIVIC:
Research on CIVIC
Game-tree analysis and word research for CIVIC, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with CIVIC, a proven-optimal strategy averages 4.03 guesses and ranks #14,767 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 4.20 guesses at best and is rank #7,392 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 4.03, at or below the proven-optimal 4.03, 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
Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it SIHVIHK.
Related meanings
Synonyms CIVIL
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- CIVIC sits in the common band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 10 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as an everyday word almost every player will know.
In a sentence
This is your civic duty.
Voting is a civic duty.
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).