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

GAITS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ɡeɪts/

Noun

plural of gait

Verb

third-person singular simple present indicative of gait

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

Related meanings

Synonyms pace

In a sentence

Horses have three gaits: Walking, trotting and galloping.
© tatoeba.org contributor danepo (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use GAITS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 94.2% 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

No

The solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.

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 GAITS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts GAITS 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 83.2% of games, misses completely in 16.8%, and leaves about 139 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #1,893 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.

All gray? Tap a tile to cycle gray → yellow → green.

First-turn measures

All four describe GAITS 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.

5.01 Entropy (bits)
139 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
94.2% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How GAITS 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.

3.62 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#1,893 Rank among openers
Opening with GAITS 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 3.62 average. It ranks #1,893 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
62
3 guesses
985
4 guesses
1,115
5 guesses
176
6 guesses
16

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
AIST

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
83%
Green tile
33%
All gray
17%

Feedback distribution

GAITS can come back 104 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

401 answers
226 answers
156 answers
134 answers
119 answers
114 answers
91 answers
79 answers
73 answers
69 answers
54 answers
48 answers
45 answers
45 answers
44 answers
39 answers
39 answers
38 answers
36 answers
31 answers
26 answers
23 answers
22 answers
21 answers
19 answers
19 answers
19 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

G2A1I1T1S1
Total: 6 points

Words With Friends

Total: 7 points

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

Strategy after playing GAITS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing GAITS:

17% chance
Suggested:
DROLE
9% chance
Suggested:
BLARE
7% chance
Suggested:
PROLE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

16.8% →
DROLE 5.89 bits
9.5% →
BLARE 5.41 bits
6.5% →
PROLE 5.27 bits
5.6% →
LINER 5.18 bits
5.0% →
MORNE 4.72 bits
4.8% →
ROUET 5.46 bits
3.8% →
CHARE 4.69 bits
3.3% →
CRONE 4.77 bits
3.1% →
ROUET 4.55 bits
2.9% →
ALERT 4.88 bits

Research on GAITS

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

Optimal play

Opening with GAITS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.67 guesses and ranks #2,586 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.78 guesses at best and is rank #787 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.62, at or below the proven-optimal 3.67, 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
GAITS 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.
Dominant sense
Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (3.5 of 5).

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); 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).