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

PIGMY

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

As an opener, it rules out about 83.8% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

Archaic spelling of pygmy.

Adjective

Archaic spelling of pygmy.

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

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

Not used yet

No past answer date found.

The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.

How PIGMY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PIGMY 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 63.7% of games, misses completely in 36.3%, and leaves about 384 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #7,826 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.

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

First-turn measures

All four describe PIGMY 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.

3.87 Entropy (bits)
384 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
83.8% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 17% of evaluated openers
2.07 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PIGMY 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.

3.72 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#7,826 Rank among openers
Opening with PIGMY solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.68 means those games clustered within about 0.68 of a guess of the 3.72 average. It ranks #7,826 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
47
3 guesses
810
4 guesses
1,271
5 guesses
213
6 guesses
13
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.46 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
I

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
64%
Green tile
30%
All gray
36%

Feedback distribution

PIGMY can come back 86 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

861 answers
271 answers
192 answers
122 answers
113 answers
100 answers
90 answers
66 answers
44 answers
32 answers
31 answers
30 answers
29 answers
27 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
20 answers
19 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers
13 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3I1G2M3Y4
Total: 13 points

Words With Friends

Total: 15 points

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

Strategy after playing PIGMY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PIGMY:

36% chance
Suggested:
TRACE
11% chance
Suggested:
TRACE
8% chance
Suggested:
SARED

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

36.3%
TRACE 6.30 bits
11.4%
TRACE 5.40 bits
8.1%
SARED 4.96 bits
5.1%
ROATE 5.33 bits
4.8%
SOARE 5.27 bits
4.2%
SATER 5.40 bits
3.8%
RONTE 4.69 bits
2.8%
CARNE 5.05 bits
1.9%
SLANE 4.06 bits
1.3%
CASTE 4.27 bits

Research on PIGMY

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

Optimal play

Opening with PIGMY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.76 guesses and ranks #8,777 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.89 guesses at best and is rank #3,920 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.72, at or below the proven-optimal 3.76, 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.

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it PIHGMEE.

Rhymes with PYGMY

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, PIGMY is a kind of someone or person.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
PIGMY 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); 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).