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

JANKY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈd͡ʒæŋ.kiː/[ˈd͡ʒæŋ.kʰɪi̯]/ˈd͡ʒeɪ̯ŋ.ki/

Adjective

Of poor quality.

“It's barely holding together, it's so janky.”

Adjective

Strange, odd.

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

Use JANKY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 84.3% 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

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 JANKY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts JANKY 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 67.2% of games, misses completely in 32.8%, and leaves about 373 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #13,771 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.88 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 JANKY 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.

3.59 Entropy (bits)
373 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
84.3% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How JANKY 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.

3.88 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#13,771 Rank among openers
Opening with JANKY left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.69 means those games clustered within about 0.69 of a guess of the 3.88 average. It ranks #13,771 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
31
3 guesses
594
4 guesses
1,365
5 guesses
342
6 guesses
21

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
AN

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
67%
Green tile
31%
All gray
33%

Feedback distribution

JANKY can come back 57 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

778 answers
399 answers
202 answers
174 answers
156 answers
84 answers
70 answers
57 answers
57 answers
40 answers
37 answers
34 answers
30 answers
27 answers
22 answers
18 answers
18 answers
18 answers
13 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
7 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers
5 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

J8A1N1K5Y4
Total: 19 points

Words With Friends

Total: 21 points

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

Strategy after playing JANKY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing JANKY:

33% chance
Suggested:
TOISE
17% chance
Suggested:
ALERT
9% chance
Suggested:
TOISE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

32.8%
TOISE 6.09 bits
16.8%
ALERT 5.58 bits
8.5%
TOISE 5.46 bits
7.3%
SOLDE 4.62 bits
6.6%
CLOTE 4.73 bits
3.5%
GRISE 4.74 bits
2.9%
TRICE 4.44 bits
2.4%
CRISE 4.72 bits
2.4%
SLART 3.51 bits
1.7%
SLADE 4.27 bits

Research on JANKY

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

Optimal play

Opening with JANKY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.89 guesses and ranks #13,602 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.04 guesses at best and is rank #6,692 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.88, at or below the proven-optimal 3.89, 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
JANKY 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.

In a sentence

That janky software keeps crashing all the time.
© tatoeba.org contributor rul (CC BY 2.0 FR)

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