CONCH
Yes, CONCH was the Wordle answer on December 22, 2025 (Wordle #1647).
As an opener, it rules out about 84.0% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈkɒnt͡ʃ//ˈkɒŋk/
- Noun
-
A marine gastropod of the family Strombidae which lives in its own spiral shell.
- Noun
-
The shell of this sea animal.
- Verb
-
To refine the flavour and texture of chocolate by warming and grinding, either in a traditional concher, or between rollers.
- Verb
-
To play a conch seashell as a musical instrument, by blowing through a hole made close to the origin of the spiral.
Alternative forms: conk, conque
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: December 22, 2025 (#1647).
See the full page for that puzzle: December 22, 2025 (#1647).
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 CONCH performs as a guess
CONCH 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 63.8% of games, misses completely in 36.2%, and leaves about 381 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,787 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.78 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 CONCH 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 CONCH 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 CONCH in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
CONCH can come back 81 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 CONCH; 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 CONCH
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to CONCH.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing CONCH:
Research on CONCH
Game-tree analysis and word research for CONCH, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with CONCH, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.82 guesses and ranks #11,567 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.96 guesses at best and is rank #5,509 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.78, at or below the proven-optimal 3.82, 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 KAHNCH.
Related meanings
In WordNet's sense inventory, CONCH is a kind of shellfish.
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- CONCH 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.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (4.1 of 5).
In a sentence
I held the conch to my ear and heard the ocean inside.
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); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).