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

MEASE

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Verb

To catch or enmesh (fish) by the head in a seine.

Noun

A measure of varying quantity, often five or six (long or short) hundred, used especially when counting herring.

Noun

A mess, a mese: a meal.

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

Etymology

The English Dialect Dictionary suggests Old Norse meiss (“wooden box, as would be used for counting fish”) as a source; The Century Dictionary suggests that the term comes via Old French from a Latin word *mesa (“barrel”). One can also compare German Mass (“measure”) and indeed measure itself.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

How it sounds

One syllable Say it MEEZ.

Rhymes with THESE TREES KNEES SEIZE TEASE

Use MEASE 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 MEASE performs as a guess

Wordle accepts MEASE 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 82.1% of games, misses completely in 17.9%, and leaves about 153 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,428 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.73 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 MEASE 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.

4.92 Entropy (bits)
153 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.6% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How MEASE 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.

3.73 Avg guesses
99.75% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#8,428 Rank among openers
Opening with MEASE left 6 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.73 average. It ranks #8,428 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
65
3 guesses
782
4 guesses
1,247
5 guesses
233
6 guesses
21

Composition

4/5 unique
3 vowels
Common:
AES

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
42%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

MEASE can come back 95 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

426 answers
255 answers
177 answers
153 answers
120 answers
94 answers
90 answers
68 answers
54 answers
51 answers
48 answers
47 answers
43 answers
41 answers
41 answers
36 answers
35 answers
32 answers
30 answers
29 answers
29 answers
26 answers
25 answers
25 answers
23 answers
23 answers
22 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

M3E1A1S1E1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 8 points

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

Strategy after playing MEASE

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing MEASE:

18% chance
Suggested:
COUNT
11% chance
Suggested:
TALON
7% chance
Suggested:
OLDER

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

17.9% →
COUNT 5.74 bits
10.7% →
TALON 5.23 bits
7.4% →
OLDER 4.88 bits
6.4% →
SNOUT 4.92 bits
5.0% →
RIONE 4.28 bits
3.9% →
CRINE 4.19 bits
3.8% →
RATEL 4.47 bits
2.9% →
BERTH 4.02 bits
2.3% →
LIMBO 4.42 bits
2.1% →
SALTY 4.39 bits

Research on MEASE

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

Optimal play

Opening with MEASE, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.72 guesses and ranks #6,008 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.88 guesses at best and is rank #3,663 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.73; proven optimal play reaches 3.72. The fixed strategy accounts for the difference.

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
MEASE 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); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).