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

PIKAS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of pika

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

Related meanings

Synonyms CONEY

Use PIKAS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 90.9% 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 PIKAS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PIKAS 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 78.8% of games, misses completely in 21.2%, and leaves about 218 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,359 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.73 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 PIKAS 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.

4.38 Entropy (bits)
218 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
90.9% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PIKAS 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.

3.73 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#8,359 Rank among openers
Opening with PIKAS left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.73 average. It ranks #8,359 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
46
3 guesses
838
4 guesses
1,200
5 guesses
247
6 guesses
21

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
AIS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
79%
Green tile
22%
All gray
21%

Feedback distribution

PIKAS can come back 75 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

505 answers
364 answers
193 answers
179 answers
125 answers
118 answers
88 answers
78 answers
56 answers
48 answers
45 answers
41 answers
40 answers
37 answers
33 answers
24 answers
24 answers
21 answers
21 answers
20 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
14 answers
14 answers
11 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3I1K5A1S1
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

Strategy after playing PIKAS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PIKAS:

21% chance
Suggested:
TONER
15% chance
Suggested:
TRONE
8% chance
Suggested:
TRINE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

21.2% →
TONER 5.99 bits
15.3% →
TRONE 5.36 bits
8.1% →
TRINE 5.50 bits
7.5% →
ROUET 5.58 bits
5.2% →
RONTE 4.67 bits
4.9% →
STALE 5.02 bits
3.7% →
RATEL 4.68 bits
3.3% →
NADIR 4.45 bits
2.3% →
STILE 4.29 bits
2.0% →
ROULE 4.74 bits

Research on PIKAS

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

Optimal play

Opening with PIKAS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.74 guesses and ranks #7,646 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.84 guesses at best and is rank #2,663 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.73, at or below the proven-optimal 3.74, 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
PIKAS 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 relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).