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

HANGI

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈhaŋi/

Noun

A traditional Māori pit oven, in which (suitably wrapped) raw food is lain on a base of heated stones.

Noun

Food cooked in this way.

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

Etymology

Borrowed from Māori hāngī.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use HANGI in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 91.3% 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 HANGI performs as a guess

Wordle accepts HANGI 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 79.4% of games, misses completely in 20.6%, and leaves about 206 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #6,485 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.69 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 HANGI 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.

4.48 Entropy (bits)
206 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
91.3% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How HANGI 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.

3.69 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#6,485 Rank among openers
Opening with HANGI 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 3.69 average. It ranks #6,485 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
48
3 guesses
873
4 guesses
1,199
5 guesses
220
6 guesses
14

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
AIN

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
79%
Green tile
22%
All gray
21%

Feedback distribution

HANGI can come back 86 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

491 answers
310 answers
271 answers
147 answers
127 answers
114 answers
70 answers
67 answers
61 answers
56 answers
50 answers
43 answers
32 answers
29 answers
29 answers
28 answers
27 answers
27 answers
26 answers
24 answers
22 answers
21 answers
21 answers
21 answers
18 answers
16 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers
12 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

H4A1N1G2I1
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Strategy after playing HANGI

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing HANGI:

21% chance
Suggested:
SOLER
13% chance
Suggested:
ALERT
11% chance
Suggested:
STILE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

20.6% →
SOLER 6.07 bits
13.0% →
ALERT 5.56 bits
11.4% →
STILE 5.34 bits
6.2% →
SLYER 4.84 bits
5.3% →
SORED 5.33 bits
4.8% →
CORSE 5.53 bits
2.9% →
ROUET 4.67 bits
2.8% →
REAST 4.55 bits
2.6% →
TRIAL 4.59 bits
2.3% →
CRAKE 4.64 bits

Research on HANGI

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

Optimal play

Opening with HANGI, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.73 guesses and ranks #6,973 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 HANGI can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.69, at or below the proven-optimal 3.73, 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
HANGI 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).