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

HURST

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /hɝst//hɜːst/

Noun

A wood or grove.

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

Etymology

From Middle English hirste (“wood, grove; hillock; sandbank, sandbar”), from Old English hyrst (“hillock, eminence, height, wood, wooded eminence”), from Proto-West Germanic *hursti; akin to Dutch horst (“thicket; bird's nest”), German Horst (“thicket, nest”). Doublet of horst.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

How it sounds

One syllable Say it HURST.

Rhymes with FIRST WORST BURST DURST WURST

Use HURST in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 92.2% 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 HURST performs as a guess

Wordle accepts HURST 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 79.1% of games, misses completely in 20.9%, and leaves about 185 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #565 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.59 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 HURST 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.

4.93 Entropy (bits)
185 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
92.2% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How HURST 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.

3.59 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#565 Rank among openers
Opening with HURST solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.59 average. It ranks #565 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
72
3 guesses
1,048
4 guesses
1,038
5 guesses
174
6 guesses
22

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
RSTU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
79%
Green tile
31%
All gray
21%

Feedback distribution

HURST can come back 122 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

499 answers
339 answers
134 answers
106 answers
70 answers
67 answers
66 answers
65 answers
63 answers
63 answers
60 answers
49 answers
46 answers
45 answers
39 answers
34 answers
32 answers
31 answers
27 answers
25 answers
24 answers
21 answers
20 answers
19 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
16 answers
13 answers
13 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

H4U1R1S1T1
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 8 points

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

Strategy after playing HURST

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing HURST:

21% chance
Suggested:
ALONE
14% chance
Suggested:
LAIDE
6% chance
Suggested:
ANILE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

20.9% →
ALONE 6.22 bits
14.2% →
LAIDE 5.34 bits
5.6% →
ANILE 5.54 bits
4.4% →
LATTE 5.09 bits
2.9% →
ALINE 4.79 bits
2.8% →
MAILE 4.14 bits
2.8% →
PLANE 4.71 bits
2.7% →
CANOE 5.06 bits
2.6% →
PLANE 4.64 bits
2.6% →
TIARE 4.64 bits

Research on HURST

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

Optimal play

Opening with HURST, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.66 guesses and ranks #2,110 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 HURST can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.59, at or below the proven-optimal 3.66, 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
HURST sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about once per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).