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

DERPY

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

As an opener, it rules out about 92.0% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈdɝˈpi/

Adjective

Foolish, silly.

Adjective

Having one's eyes pointing in different directions; strabismic.

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

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

Not used yet

No past answer date found.

The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.

How DERPY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts DERPY 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 80.7% of games, misses completely in 19.3%, and leaves about 188 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #3,513 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.65 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 DERPY 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.

4.65 Entropy (bits)
188 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
92.0% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 62% of evaluated openers
1.30 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How DERPY 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.

3.65 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#3,513 Rank among openers
Opening with DERPY solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.69 means those games clustered within about 0.69 of a guess of the 3.65 average. It ranks #3,513 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
68
3 guesses
910
4 guesses
1,181
5 guesses
179
6 guesses
16
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.45 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ER

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
81%
Green tile
32%
All gray
19%

Feedback distribution

DERPY can come back 103 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

455 answers
322 answers
192 answers
192 answers
142 answers
83 answers
78 answers
61 answers
56 answers
55 answers
51 answers
44 answers
33 answers
32 answers
31 answers
30 answers
29 answers
26 answers
25 answers
25 answers
22 answers
19 answers
18 answers
18 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
14 answers
13 answers

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing DERPY:

19% chance
Suggested:
SLANT
14% chance
Suggested:
SLANT
8% chance
Suggested:
COAST

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

19.3%
SLANT 6.13 bits
13.6%
SLANT 5.80 bits
8.1%
COAST 5.44 bits
8.1%
STAIR 4.56 bits
6.0%
SAULT 4.72 bits
3.5%
SLANT 5.30 bits
3.3%
THALE 4.53 bits
2.6%
ALINE 4.84 bits
2.4%
ALOUD 4.73 bits
2.3%
COAST 4.74 bits

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

D2E1R1P3Y4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

The science of DERPY

What game-tree analysis and word research measure about DERPY — each figure with what it means.

Optimal play

Opening with DERPY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.68 guesses — rank #3,758 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 DERPY can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.65 — at or below the proven-optimal 3.68 only 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) — not the site's working answer pool.

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable — say it DURPEE. Estimated pronunciation

This pronunciation is machine-estimated, not taken from a pronunciation dictionary.

How people know it

Frequency
DERPY sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English — an uncommon word many players still recognize.

In a sentence

It made me clumsy and derpy as I felt all my worries melt away.
© tatoeba.org contributor DJ_Saidez (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).