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

PALEA

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈpælɪə//ˈpeɪlɪə//ˈpalɪə/

Noun

The interior chaff or husk of grasses.

Noun

One of the chaffy scales or bractlets growing on the receptacle of many compound flowers, such as the sunflower.

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

Use PALEA in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 92.7% 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 PALEA performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PALEA 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 81.5% of games, misses completely in 18.5%, and leaves about 174 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,877 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.

All gray? Tap a tile to cycle gray → yellow → green.

First-turn measures

All four describe PALEA 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.

4.68 Entropy (bits)
174 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
92.7% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PALEA 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.

3.74 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#8,877 Rank among openers
Opening with PALEA 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 3.74 average. It ranks #8,877 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
64
3 guesses
791
4 guesses
1,216
5 guesses
263
6 guesses
19

Composition

4/5 unique
3 vowels
Common:
AEL

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
34%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

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

441 answers
291 answers
163 answers
163 answers
139 answers
127 answers
118 answers
89 answers
73 answers
59 answers
56 answers
47 answers
39 answers
34 answers
34 answers
33 answers
32 answers
30 answers
24 answers
20 answers
19 answers
18 answers
18 answers
16 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3A1L1E1A1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing PALEA

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PALEA:

18% chance
Suggested:
SNORT
12% chance
Suggested:
RINSE
7% chance
Suggested:
SENOR

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

18.5% →
SNORT 5.90 bits
12.2% →
RINSE 5.33 bits
6.8% →
SENOR 4.34 bits
6.8% →
TRAIN 5.19 bits
5.8% →
CLOUT 4.69 bits
5.3% →
REAST 4.85 bits
4.9% →
RONTE 4.12 bits
3.7% →
COAST 4.28 bits
3.1% →
TOILE 4.29 bits
2.5% →
SLART 3.94 bits

Research on PALEA

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

Optimal play

Opening with PALEA, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.73 guesses and ranks #7,126 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 PALEA can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.74, at or below the proven-optimal 3.73, 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
PALEA 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).