GRIEF
Yes, GRIEF was the Wordle answer on May 19, 2023 (Wordle #699).
As an opener, it rules out about 92.9% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ɡɹiːf/
- Noun
-
Suffering, hardship.
“The neighbour's teenagers give me grief every time they see me.”
- Noun
-
Emotional pain, generally arising from misfortune, significant personal loss, bereavement, misconduct of oneself or others, etc.; sorrow; sadness.
“She was worn out from so much grief.”
- Verb
-
To deliberately harass and annoy or cause grief to other players of a game in order to interfere with their enjoyment of it; especially, to do this as one’s primary activity in the game, and especially by exploiting game mechanics without using cheats to do so, often through acts of destruction or vandalism.
Alternative forms: greefe, griefe
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
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
Used oncePast Wordle answer: May 19, 2023 (#699).
See the full page for that puzzle: May 19, 2023 (#699).
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 GRIEF performs as a guess
GRIEF is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,374 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 81.7% of games, misses completely in 18.3%, and leaves about 169 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #4,491 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.66 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 GRIEF 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 GRIEF 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 GRIEF in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
GRIEF can come back 108 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 GRIEF; 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 GRIEF
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to GRIEF.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing GRIEF:
Research on GRIEF
Game-tree analysis and word research for GRIEF, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with GRIEF, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.70 guesses and ranks #4,726 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 GRIEF can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.66, 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.
Related meanings
In WordNet's sense inventory, GRIEF is a kind of sorrow or input.
Synonyms sorrow heartbreak heartache
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- GRIEF sits in the common band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 12 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as an everyday word almost every player will know.
- Learner level
- Appears in intermediate learner vocabulary (CEFR-J level B2); a word learners usually reach after the basics.
- Age of acquisition
- Typically learned around age 9, by Glasgow Norms speaker ratings.
- Imageability
- Imageability score: 48 of 100. Raters gave it a middle-range score.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with internal bodily sensation (4.1 of 5).
In a sentence
Please don't give me grief.
I'm sorry for your grief.
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Learner levels: CEFR-J Wordlist ver 1.5, Tono Laboratory, TUFS; Glasgow Norms (CC BY 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).