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

LOVES

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /lʌvz/

Noun

plural of love

Verb

third-person singular simple present indicative of love

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

How it sounds

One syllable Say it LUHVZ.

Rhymes with DOVES

Related meanings

Synonyms know fuck baby ENJOY bed dear

Opposites hate

In a sentence

He loves her and me.
© tatoeba.org contributor shekitten (CC BY 2.0 FR)
She loves her and me.
© tatoeba.org contributor shekitten (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use LOVES in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 93.6% 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 LOVES performs as a guess

Wordle accepts LOVES 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 85.1% of games, misses completely in 14.9%, and leaves about 151 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #7,294 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.71 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 LOVES 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.

4.75 Entropy (bits)
151 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.6% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How LOVES 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.

3.71 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#7,294 Rank among openers
Opening with LOVES solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.72 means those games clustered within about 0.72 of a guess of the 3.71 average. It ranks #7,294 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
75
3 guesses
811
4 guesses
1,211
5 guesses
241
6 guesses
16

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ELOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
85%
Green tile
28%
All gray
15%

Feedback distribution

LOVES can come back 101 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

355 answers
282 answers
182 answers
151 answers
144 answers
130 answers
117 answers
114 answers
113 answers
64 answers
52 answers
50 answers
49 answers
43 answers
42 answers
33 answers
28 answers
28 answers
26 answers
23 answers
21 answers
21 answers
19 answers
13 answers
13 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

L1O1V4E1S1
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Strategy after playing LOVES

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing LOVES:

15% chance
Suggested:
TRAIN
12% chance
Suggested:
TIARE
8% chance
Suggested:
STAIR

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

14.9% →
TRAIN 5.96 bits
11.8% →
TIARE 5.55 bits
7.6% →
STAIR 5.24 bits
6.3% →
FLAIL 4.78 bits
6.0% →
APRON 5.07 bits
5.5% →
EATER 4.36 bits
4.9% →
STAIR 4.83 bits
4.8% →
REATE 4.60 bits
4.7% →
NORTH 4.17 bits
2.7% →
STALL 4.35 bits

Research on LOVES

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

Optimal play

Opening with LOVES, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.72 guesses and ranks #6,472 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.86 guesses at best and is rank #3,029 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.71, at or below the proven-optimal 3.72, 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
LOVES sits in the common band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 46 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as an everyday word almost every player will know.
Dominant sense
Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with internal bodily sensation (4.4 of 5).

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).