PAGAN
PAGAN is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈpeɪɡən/
- Adjective
-
Relating to, characteristic of religions that differ from main world religions.
“Under Christianization, many converted societies transformed their pagan deities into saints.”
- Adjective
-
Savage, immoral, uncivilized, wild.
- Noun
-
A person not adhering to a main world religion; a follower of a pantheistic or nature-worshipping religion.
“This community has a surprising number of pagans.”
- Noun
-
An uncivilized or unsocialized person.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From Middle English pagan (adjective and noun), from Latin pāgānus (“rural, rustic; civilian”), replaced Middle English payen from the same root.
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it PAYGUHN.
Related meanings
Synonyms ethnic heathen gentile
Opposites religious
In a sentence
Tom is a pagan priest.
Mary and Alice are pagan.
Use PAGAN in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 86.4% 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 →PAGAN 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 #592
Reveal this appearance's category
PAGAN appeared in RHYMES OF U.S. PRESIDENT NAMES (purple group).
How PAGAN performs as a guess
PAGAN 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 68.0% of games, misses completely in 32.0%, and leaves about 325 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #9,465 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.75 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 PAGAN 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 PAGAN 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 PAGAN in 3 guesses.
Feedback distribution
PAGAN can come back 82 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 PAGAN; 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 PAGAN
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to PAGAN.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing PAGAN:
Research on PAGAN
Game-tree analysis and word research for PAGAN, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with PAGAN, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.79 guesses and ranks #10,067 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.91 guesses at best and is rank #4,453 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.75, 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
- PAGAN sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 4 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (2.4 of 5).
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).