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

LURGY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈlɜːɡi//ˈlɜɹɡi/

Noun

Chiefly preceded by the.

“the dreaded lurgy”

Adjective

Idle, lazy.

Alternative forms: lurgee, lurgey, lurgi

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

Etymology

The noun is derived from fever-lurgy, possibly influenced by or related to lurk (“to hang out or wait”). Fever-lurgy is possibly a variant of fever lurden (“idleness regarded as a medical condition”), from fever + lurden, lurdane (“used as a general term of abuse for a person, especially one regarded as dull or idle: loafer, sluggard”).

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

In a sentence

Tom's caught some kind of lurgy.
© tatoeba.org contributor deniko (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use LURGY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 90.5% 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 LURGY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts LURGY 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 79.7% of games, misses completely in 20.3%, and leaves about 227 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #7,905 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.72 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 LURGY 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.

4.41 Entropy (bits)
227 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
90.5% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How LURGY 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.

3.72 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.73 Spread of game lengths
#7,905 Rank among openers
Opening with LURGY left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.73 means those games clustered within about 0.73 of a guess of the 3.72 average. It ranks #7,905 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
58
3 guesses
856
4 guesses
1,155
5 guesses
255
6 guesses
28

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
LRU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
80%
Green tile
30%
All gray
20%

Feedback distribution

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

484 answers
395 answers
296 answers
143 answers
104 answers
74 answers
55 answers
55 answers
54 answers
52 answers
51 answers
50 answers
50 answers
35 answers
34 answers
31 answers
30 answers
29 answers
28 answers
14 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
9 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

L1U1R1G2Y4
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing LURGY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing LURGY:

20% chance
Suggested:
SAICE
17% chance
Suggested:
IRATE
12% chance
Suggested:
STOAE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

20.3% →
SAICE 6.21 bits
16.6% →
IRATE 5.31 bits
12.4% →
STOAE 5.45 bits
6.0% →
SATED 4.92 bits
4.4% →
STONE 5.33 bits
3.1% →
SCOTE 5.00 bits
2.3% →
CRUET 4.64 bits
2.3% →
ARIEL 4.41 bits
2.3% →
TOISE 4.83 bits
2.2% →
ATONE 4.57 bits

Research on LURGY

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

Optimal play

Opening with LURGY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.74 guesses and ranks #7,738 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.87 guesses at best and is rank #3,527 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.72, at or below the proven-optimal 3.74, 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
LURGY 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).