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

GOATY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈɡəʊti//ˈɡoʊti/

Adjective

Like a goat, goatlike or redolent of goats.

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

Use GOATY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 93.7% 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 GOATY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts GOATY 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 83.0% of games, misses completely in 17.0%, and leaves about 150 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #3,999 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 GOATY 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.

4.85 Entropy (bits)
150 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.7% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How GOATY 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
99.92% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#3,999 Rank among openers
Opening with GOATY 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 3.65 average. It ranks #3,999 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
65
3 guesses
914
4 guesses
1,163
5 guesses
191
6 guesses
19

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
AOT

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
83%
Green tile
42%
All gray
17%

Feedback distribution

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

405 answers
214 answers
179 answers
165 answers
163 answers
117 answers
97 answers
92 answers
66 answers
62 answers
61 answers
60 answers
55 answers
46 answers
41 answers
35 answers
28 answers
25 answers
21 answers
21 answers
20 answers
20 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
15 answers
14 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

G2O1A1T1Y4
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing GOATY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing GOATY:

17% chance
Suggested:
SLIER
9% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
8% chance
Suggested:
SLIER

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

17.0% →
SLIER 6.15 bits
9.0% →
RAILE 5.34 bits
7.5% →
SLIER 5.57 bits
6.9% →
SLICE 5.15 bits
6.8% →
CRINE 5.30 bits
4.9% →
SIDLE 4.56 bits
4.1% →
CRUSE 4.53 bits
3.9% →
RATEL 4.66 bits
2.8% →
CAROL 4.47 bits
2.6% →
SENOR 4.45 bits

Research on GOATY

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

Optimal play

Opening with GOATY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.70 guesses and ranks #5,026 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.85 guesses at best and is rank #2,959 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.65, at or below the proven-optimal 3.70, 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
GOATY 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); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).