HERBY
HERBY is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈhɜː.bi//ˈ(h)ɝ.bi/
- Adjective
-
Of or pertaining to herbs.
- Adjective
-
Full of herbal aroma or flavour.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
In a sentence
Parsnips are a surprisingly herby vegetable.
There was the smell of seaweed in the air and of herby autumnal flowers.
Use HERBY in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 91.8% 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
NoThe solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.
Past Wordle answer
No completed appearanceNo 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.
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See what the public sample says →How HERBY performs as a guess
Wordle accepts HERBY 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 82.7% of games, misses completely in 17.3%, and leaves about 196 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #7,446 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.71 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 HERBY 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 HERBY 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
Feedback distribution
HERBY can come back 92 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 HERBY; 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 HERBY
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to HERBY.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing HERBY:
Research on HERBY
Game-tree analysis and word research for HERBY, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with HERBY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.75 guesses and ranks #7,982 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.94 guesses at best and is rank #5,002 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.71, at or below the proven-optimal 3.75, 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
- HERBY 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).