FEMME
FEMME is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /fɛm/
- Noun
-
A woman; a wife; (now chiefly Canada, US) a young woman or girl.
- Noun
-
A lesbian or other queer woman whose appearance, identity etc. is seen as feminine as opposed to butch.
- Adjective
-
Pertaining to a femme; feminine, female.
- Adjective
-
Effeminate (of a man).
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
Borrowed from French femme (“woman”). Doublet of feme, femina, and hembra.
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
One syllable Say it FEHM.
In a sentence
Mary is a femme lesbian.
Mary is a femme fatale.
Use FEMME in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 78.8% 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
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
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 FEMME performs as a guess
FEMME 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 58.6% of games, misses completely in 41.4%, and leaves about 505 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #14,375 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.94 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 FEMME 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 FEMME 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 FEMME in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
FEMME can come back 48 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 FEMME; 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 FEMME
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to FEMME.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing FEMME:
Research on FEMME
Game-tree analysis and word research for FEMME, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with FEMME, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.94 guesses and ranks #14,371 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 FEMME can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.94, at or below the proven-optimal 3.94, 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
- FEMME sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 2 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (2.5 of 5).
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); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).