COSTA
COSTA is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈkɒ.stə//ˈkɑ.stə/
- Noun
-
Synonym of rib.
- Noun
-
A riblike part of a plant or animal, such as a midrib of a leaf or a thickened vein or the margin of an insect wing.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From pan-Romance (Portuguese Costa, Galician Costa, Spanish Costa, Catalan Costa, Occitan Costa, French Costa, Italian Costa), from Latin costa (“rib; side”).
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it KAWSTAH.
Related meanings
Synonyms rib
In a sentence
The president of this team is Costa Rican.
I am not going to Costa Rica anymore.
Use COSTA in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 94.5% of possible answers.
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
NoThe solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.
Past Wordle answer
No completed appearanceNo 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.
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See what the public sample says →How COSTA performs as a guess
Wordle accepts COSTA 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 85.7% of games, misses completely in 14.3%, and leaves about 130 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #2,121 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.62 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 COSTA 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 COSTA 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
Feedback distribution
COSTA can come back 104 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 COSTA; 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 COSTA
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to COSTA.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing COSTA:
Research on COSTA
Game-tree analysis and word research for COSTA, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with COSTA, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.66 guesses and ranks #2,135 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
No guaranteed hard-mode solve In hard mode, no strategy that opens with COSTA can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.62, at or below the proven-optimal 3.66, 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
- COSTA sits in the common band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 14 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as an everyday word almost every player will know.
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).