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

HULLY

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

As an opener, it rules out about 83.0% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Adjective

Having or containing hulls (peel, shell etc.).

“hully cotton”

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

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

Not used yet

No past answer date found.

The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.

How HULLY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts HULLY 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 63.6% of games, misses completely in 36.4%, and leaves about 401 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #13,188 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.85 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 HULLY 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.

3.67 Entropy (bits)
401 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
83.0% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 11% of evaluated openers
2.28 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How HULLY 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.

3.85 Avg guesses
99.87% Solved within six
0.75 Spread of game lengths
#13,188 Rank among openers
Opening with HULLY left 3 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.75 means those games clustered within about 0.75 of a guess of the 3.85 average. It ranks #13,188 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
37
3 guesses
710
4 guesses
1,207
5 guesses
357
6 guesses
40
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.45 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
LU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
64%
Green tile
30%
All gray
36%

Feedback distribution

HULLY can come back 69 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

860 answers
278 answers
205 answers
203 answers
164 answers
83 answers
50 answers
46 answers
41 answers
38 answers
29 answers
26 answers
26 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
15 answers
15 answers
15 answers
13 answers
12 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing HULLY:

36% chance
Suggested:
ARISE
12% chance
Suggested:
TIARE
9% chance
Suggested:
CRATE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

36.4%
ARISE 6.18 bits
11.8%
TIARE 5.23 bits
8.7%
CRATE 5.77 bits
8.6%
SARED 4.94 bits
6.9%
STONE 5.43 bits
3.5%
TARGE 4.83 bits
2.1%
SANER 4.74 bits
1.9%
PRONE 3.81 bits
1.7%
PAISE 4.57 bits
1.6%
MORNE 2.78 bits

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

H4U1L1L1Y4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

The science of HULLY

What game-tree analysis and word research measure about HULLY — each figure with what it means.

Optimal play

Opening with HULLY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.87 guesses — rank #13,203 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 HULLY can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.85 — at or below the proven-optimal 3.87 only 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) — not the site's working answer pool.

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable — say it HUHLEE. Estimated pronunciation

This pronunciation is machine-estimated, not taken from a pronunciation dictionary.

How people know it

Frequency
HULLY sits in the rare band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English — a word few players will have met in print.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).