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

HOOTY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Adjective

Characterised by a hooting sound.

Adjective

Very funny; hilarious; fit to make one hoot with laughter.

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

Use HOOTY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 85.9% 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 HOOTY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts HOOTY 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 67.4% of games, misses completely in 32.6%, and leaves about 336 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #11,735 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 HOOTY 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.

3.97 Entropy (bits)
336 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
85.9% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How HOOTY 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
100% Solved within six
0.74 Spread of game lengths
#11,735 Rank among openers
Opening with HOOTY solved every answer in the snapshot within 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 #11,735 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
41
3 guesses
760
4 guesses
1,208
5 guesses
313
6 guesses
32

Composition

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
OT

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
67%
Green tile
38%
All gray
33%

Feedback distribution

HOOTY can come back 72 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

777 answers
299 answers
199 answers
137 answers
108 answers
106 answers
105 answers
59 answers
42 answers
40 answers
39 answers
37 answers
36 answers
35 answers
25 answers
24 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
16 answers
14 answers
13 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
8 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

H4O1O1T1Y4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing HOOTY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing HOOTY:

33% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
13% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL
8% chance
Suggested:
RAILE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

32.6% →
RAILE 6.21 bits
12.5% →
ARIEL 5.68 bits
8.3% →
RAILE 4.82 bits
5.7% →
CARLE 5.43 bits
4.5% →
CARLE 4.79 bits
4.4% →
MANOR 5.18 bits
4.4% →
CRANE 4.95 bits
2.5% →
CRISE 4.68 bits
1.8% →
SLADE 3.59 bits
1.7% →
SATED 3.81 bits

Research on HOOTY

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

Optimal play

Opening with HOOTY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.83 guesses and ranks #12,033 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.00 guesses at best and is rank #6,220 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.80, at or below the proven-optimal 3.83, 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
HOOTY 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).