Possible answer Not used yet C tier for first-turn info

EKING

EKING is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

The act or process of adding.

Noun

That which is added.

Verb

present participle and gerund of eke

Alternative forms: eeking, ekeing

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

Etymology

From Middle English *eking, *eching, deverbal of eken (“to increase, add”), equivalent to eke + -ing. More at eke.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it EEKIHNG.

Use EKING in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 89.0% 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

Yes

Included among the answers considered by the solver.

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 EKING performs as a guess

EKING is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,384 when every answer is treated as equally likely.

Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 78.1% of games, misses completely in 21.9%, and leaves about 263 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,181 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.77 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 EKING 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.

4.19 Entropy (bits)
263 Avg remaining
0.04% Exact match
89.0% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How EKING 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.

3.77 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#10,181 Rank among openers
Opening with EKING left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.77 average. It ranks #10,181 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
1
2 guesses
39
3 guesses
783
4 guesses
1,233
5 guesses
280
6 guesses
16

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
EIN

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
78%
Green tile
20%
All gray
22%

Example solver route

R O A T E
S I L E N
E K I N G

One example route used by the solver.

This solver benchmark reaches EKING in 3 guesses.

Feedback distribution

EKING can come back 72 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

522 answers
517 answers
166 answers
95 answers
88 answers
79 answers
75 answers
70 answers
65 answers
65 answers
64 answers
54 answers
46 answers
42 answers
39 answers
33 answers
28 answers
25 answers
21 answers
20 answers
19 answers
17 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
14 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
10 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

E1K5I1N1G2
Total: 10 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

Strategy after playing EKING

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing EKING:

22% chance
Suggested:
ROAST
22% chance
Suggested:
ROAST
7% chance
Suggested:
SALTY

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

21.9% →
ROAST 6.04 bits
21.7% →
ROAST 5.64 bits
7.0% →
SALTY 4.92 bits
4.0% →
SONAR 4.95 bits
3.7% →
SONAR 4.59 bits
3.3% →
ALURE 4.61 bits
3.1% →
SLART 4.98 bits
2.9% →
RIFLE 4.41 bits
2.7% →
SAURY 4.76 bits
2.7% →
CLARY 4.83 bits

Research on EKING

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

Optimal play

Opening with EKING, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.79 guesses and ranks #10,067 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 EKING can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.77, at or below the proven-optimal 3.79, 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
EKING sits in the rare band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word few players will have met in print.

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).