GRUEL
Yes, GRUEL was the Wordle answer on August 16, 2022 (Wordle #423).
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈɡɹuːəl//ɡɹuːl//ɡɹʊəl/
- Noun
-
A thin, watery porridge, formerly eaten primarily by the poor and the ill.
- Noun
-
Punishment.
- Verb
-
To exhaust, use up, disable.
- Verb
-
To punish.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From Middle English gruel, gruwel, greuel, growel (“meal or flour made from beans, lentils, etc.”), from Old French gruel (“coarse meal; > French gruau”), from Medieval Latin grutellum, diminutive of Medieval Latin grutum (“flour; meal”), from a Germanic source, likely Old English grūt (“meal; grout”) or perhaps Frankish *grūt; both from Proto-Germanic *grūtiz (“ground material; grit”). Compare Dutch gruit, Middle Low German grūt, Middle High German grūz, German Grütze (“grout”).
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it GROOIHL.
In a sentence
Rice gruel is easy to digest.
When he was young, he was poor and had to live on rice gruel.
Use GRUEL in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 94.7% 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
Used oncePast Wordle answer: August 16, 2022 (#423).
See the full page for that puzzle: August 16, 2022 (#423).
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
Wordle Observatory · optional
Played this Wordle?
Add your result to the public totals · about 20 seconds
Wordle Observatory · optional
Played this Wordle?
Add your result to the public totals · about 20 seconds
Add your result and a quick difficulty rating to help explain how this puzzle played.
See the public dataThank you. Your result now helps describe this puzzle.
See what the public sample says →How GRUEL performs as a guess
GRUEL 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 85.9% of games, misses completely in 14.1%, and leaves about 126 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #2,637 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.63 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 GRUEL 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 GRUEL 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 GRUEL in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
GRUEL can come back 111 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 GRUEL; 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 GRUEL
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to GRUEL.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing GRUEL:
Research on GRUEL
Game-tree analysis and word research for GRUEL, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with GRUEL, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.67 guesses and ranks #2,650 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 GRUEL can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.63, 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
- GRUEL sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as an uncommon word many players still recognize.
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).