OAKEN
OAKEN is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈəʊk.ən/
- Adjective
-
Made from the wood of the oak tree. Also in metaphorical uses, suggesting robustness.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English oken (also eken), from Old English ācen, ǣċen (“of oak”), from Proto-Germanic *aikīnaz, equivalent to oak + -en (adjectival suffix). Cognate with Dutch eiken (“oaken”), German eichen (“oaken”), Icelandic eikinn (“oaken”).
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
Related meanings
Synonyms WOODY
In a sentence
Place the deck of cards on the oaken table.
Use OAKEN in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 94.7% of possible answers.
Wordle status
A word can be a playable guess without being a possible answer.
Playable guess
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
No completed appearanceNo 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.
Wordle Observatory · optional
Played this Wordle?
Add your result to the public totals · about 20 seconds
Wordle Observatory · optional
Played this Wordle?
Add your result to the public totals · about 20 seconds
Add your result and a quick difficulty rating to help explain how this puzzle played.
See the public dataThank you. Your result now helps describe this puzzle.
See what the public sample says →How OAKEN performs as a guess
OAKEN is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,384 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 89.5% of games, misses completely in 10.5%, and leaves about 127 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,176 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe OAKEN 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.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How OAKEN 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.
Composition
Feedback chances
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches OAKEN in 3 guesses.
Feedback distribution
OAKEN can come back 85 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for OAKEN; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
Try next
Strategy after playing OAKEN
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to OAKEN.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing OAKEN:
Research on OAKEN
Game-tree analysis and word research for OAKEN, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with OAKEN, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.71 guesses and ranks #5,592 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 OAKEN can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.72; proven optimal play reaches 3.71. 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
- OAKEN 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 relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).