OPIUM
OPIUM is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈoʊ.pi.əm//ˈəʊ.pi.əm//ˈoʊp.jəm/
- Noun
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A yellow-brown, addictive narcotic drug obtained from the dried juice of unripe pods of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, and containing alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, and papaverine.
- Noun
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Anything that numbs or stupefies.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
How it sounds
Three syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it OHPEEUHM.
In a sentence
Football is the opium of the people.
Religion is the opium of the people.
Use OPIUM in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 89.3% 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.
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See what the public sample says →OPIUM in Connections
1 recorded appearance in completed main-edition puzzles through . A category label alone does not establish a word's meaning.
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· Puzzle #1225
Reveal this appearance's category
OPIUM appeared in FAMOUS PERFUMES (blue group).
How OPIUM performs as a guess
OPIUM 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 75.7% of games, misses completely in 24.3%, and leaves about 256 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,845 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.74 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 OPIUM 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 OPIUM 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 OPIUM in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
OPIUM can come back 75 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 OPIUM; 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 OPIUM
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to OPIUM.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing OPIUM:
Research on OPIUM
Game-tree analysis and word research for OPIUM, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with OPIUM, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.79 guesses and ranks #10,189 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.90 guesses at best and is rank #4,248 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.74, at or below the proven-optimal 3.79, 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
- OPIUM sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 3 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Age of acquisition
- Typically learned around age 12, by Glasgow Norms speaker ratings.
- Imageability
- Imageability score: 52 of 100. Raters gave it a middle-range score.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (3.1 of 5).
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); Glasgow Norms (CC BY 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).