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

HERRY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Verb

Pronunciation spelling of hurry

Verb

To honour, praise or celebrate.

Alternative forms: herye, hery

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

Etymology

From Middle English heryen, herien, from Old English herian (“to extol, praise, commend, help”), from Proto-West Germanic *haʀjan, from Proto-Germanic *hazjaną (“to call, praise”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱens- (“to speak in a florid, solemn style, attest, witness”).

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use HERRY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 90.4% 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 HERRY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts HERRY 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 80.1% of games, misses completely in 19.9%, and leaves about 229 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #11,808 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.80 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 HERRY 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.

4.24 Entropy (bits)
229 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
90.4% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How HERRY 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.

3.80 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.74 Spread of game lengths
#11,808 Rank among openers
Opening with HERRY left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.74 means those games clustered within about 0.74 of a guess of the 3.80 average. It ranks #11,808 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
43
3 guesses
755
4 guesses
1,207
5 guesses
312
6 guesses
35

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ER

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
80%
Green tile
35%
All gray
20%

Feedback distribution

HERRY can come back 78 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

474 answers
396 answers
219 answers
205 answers
176 answers
135 answers
95 answers
60 answers
51 answers
43 answers
41 answers
29 answers
27 answers
26 answers
26 answers
23 answers
20 answers
19 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
14 answers
14 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
9 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

H4E1R1R1Y4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing HERRY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing HERRY:

20% chance
Suggested:
SLAIN
17% chance
Suggested:
SLANE
9% chance
Suggested:
AINEE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

19.9% →
SLAIN 6.13 bits
16.6% →
SLANE 5.50 bits
9.2% →
AINEE 4.34 bits
8.6% →
SAULT 4.72 bits
7.4% →
TRAIN 5.00 bits
5.7% →
COAST 5.27 bits
4.0% →
LIANE 4.50 bits
2.5% →
SAICE 4.76 bits
2.1% →
COAST 4.64 bits
1.8% →
COAST 4.53 bits

Research on HERRY

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

Optimal play

Opening with HERRY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.82 guesses and ranks #11,713 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 HERRY can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.80, at or below the proven-optimal 3.82, 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
HERRY 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).