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

OWLET

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈaʊlət/

Noun

Diminutive of owl.

Noun

A young owl; owling.

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

Etymology

From owl + -et. Compare howlet.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use OWLET in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 94.2% 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 OWLET performs as a guess

Wordle accepts OWLET 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 86.4% of games, misses completely in 13.6%, and leaves about 139 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #6,022 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.69 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 OWLET 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.

4.90 Entropy (bits)
139 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
94.2% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How OWLET 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.

3.69 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#6,022 Rank among openers
Opening with OWLET left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.72 means those games clustered within about 0.72 of a guess of the 3.69 average. It ranks #6,022 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
79
3 guesses
842
4 guesses
1,188
5 guesses
227
6 guesses
17

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ELOT

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
86%
Green tile
30%
All gray
14%

Feedback distribution

OWLET can come back 105 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

324 answers
279 answers
199 answers
164 answers
121 answers
118 answers
104 answers
89 answers
79 answers
70 answers
66 answers
63 answers
50 answers
48 answers
44 answers
32 answers
29 answers
28 answers
26 answers
22 answers
22 answers
20 answers
20 answers
19 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
15 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

O1W4L1E1T1
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing OWLET

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing OWLET:

14% chance
Suggested:
CAIRN
12% chance
Suggested:
SEARE
8% chance
Suggested:
ACORN

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

13.6% →
CAIRN 5.85 bits
11.7% →
SEARE 5.42 bits
8.3% →
ACORN 5.10 bits
6.9% →
SLAIN 5.03 bits
5.1% →
SITAR 4.91 bits
4.9% →
AIDER 4.22 bits
4.4% →
GLARE 4.56 bits
3.7% →
TARTE 4.86 bits
3.3% →
SNORE 4.49 bits
2.9% →
SAURY 4.65 bits

Research on OWLET

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

Optimal play

Opening with OWLET, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.68 guesses and ranks #3,721 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.80 guesses at best and is rank #1,500 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.69, at or below the proven-optimal 3.68, 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
OWLET 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).