Possible answer Not used yet C tier for first-turn info

HARPY

HARPY is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈhɑɹpi//ˈhɑːpi/

Noun

A mythological creature generally depicted as a bird-of-prey with the head of a maiden, a face pale with hunger and long claws on her hands personifying the destructive power of storm winds.

Noun

A shrewish woman.

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

Etymology

Ultimately from Middle French harpie, from Latin harpyia, from Ancient Greek ἅρπυιᾰ (hárpuiă, literally “snatcher”), from ἁρπάζω (harpázō, “to snatch, seize”). Compare rapacious. Middle English had arpie.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

In a sentence

My landlady is a harpy.
© tatoeba.org contributor felidad (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use HARPY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 92.3% 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

Yes

Included among the answers considered by the solver.

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 HARPY performs as a guess

HARPY 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 81.2% of games, misses completely in 18.8%, and leaves about 183 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #4,463 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.

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

First-turn measures

All four describe HARPY 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.

4.63 Entropy (bits)
183 Avg remaining
0.04% Exact match
92.3% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How HARPY 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.

3.66 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#4,463 Rank among openers
Opening with HARPY left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.66 average. It ranks #4,463 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
1
2 guesses
70
3 guesses
890
4 guesses
1,171
5 guesses
207
6 guesses
14

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
AR

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
81%
Green tile
33%
All gray
19%

Example solver route

R O A T E
C A R R Y
H A R D Y
H A R P Y

One example route used by the solver.

This solver benchmark reaches HARPY in 4 guesses.

Feedback distribution

HARPY can come back 107 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

447 answers
278 answers
246 answers
153 answers
133 answers
129 answers
115 answers
83 answers
53 answers
53 answers
50 answers
49 answers
43 answers
40 answers
31 answers
29 answers
25 answers
24 answers
23 answers
19 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
15 answers
13 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

H4A1R1P3Y4
Total: 13 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

Strategy after playing HARPY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing HARPY:

19% chance
Suggested:
TOILE
12% chance
Suggested:
TRIED
10% chance
Suggested:
SLATE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

18.8% →
TOILE 6.18 bits
11.7% →
TRIED 5.26 bits
10.3% →
SLATE 5.52 bits
6.4% →
TRADE 4.67 bits
5.6% →
SIDLE 4.66 bits
5.4% →
SUITE 5.36 bits
4.8% →
TOILE 4.63 bits
3.5% →
STILE 5.26 bits
2.2% →
POISE 4.48 bits
2.2% →
NOISE 4.71 bits

Research on HARPY

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

Optimal play

Opening with HARPY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.70 guesses and ranks #4,893 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.83 guesses at best and is rank #2,295 of the 7,453 openers that can still 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.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
HARPY 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); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).