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

POLIS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈpɒ.lɪs//ˈpoʊ.lɪs/

Noun

The police.

Noun

A police officer.

Alternative forms: pollis

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

Etymology

Borrowed from Scots polis. Doublet of police, policy, and polity.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

How it sounds

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

Rhymes with BOLUS COLAS

In a sentence

Puran Polis are made using jaggery.
© tatoeba.org contributor sabretou (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use POLIS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 93.4% 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 POLIS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts POLIS 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 81.9% of games, misses completely in 18.1%, and leaves about 158 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #971 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.60 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 POLIS 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.

4.84 Entropy (bits)
158 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.4% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How POLIS 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.

3.60 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#971 Rank among openers
Opening with POLIS left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.69 means those games clustered within about 0.69 of a guess of the 3.60 average. It ranks #971 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
63
3 guesses
1,016
4 guesses
1,091
5 guesses
169
6 guesses
14

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ILOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
28%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

POLIS can come back 108 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

432 answers
197 answers
196 answers
179 answers
154 answers
140 answers
75 answers
69 answers
66 answers
56 answers
53 answers
53 answers
43 answers
43 answers
41 answers
37 answers
36 answers
30 answers
30 answers
22 answers
22 answers
20 answers
20 answers
17 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3O1L1I1S1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing POLIS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing POLIS:

18% chance
Suggested:
TRACE
8% chance
Suggested:
TRINE
8% chance
Suggested:
STARE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

18.1% →
TRACE 6.24 bits
8.3% →
TRINE 5.56 bits
8.2% →
STARE 5.67 bits
7.5% →
RANCE 5.33 bits
6.5% →
CRANE 5.44 bits
5.9% →
TRADE 4.51 bits
3.1% →
CARLE 4.18 bits
2.9% →
STIRE 4.67 bits
2.8% →
CARET 5.03 bits
2.3% →
TRONE 4.41 bits

Research on POLIS

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

Optimal play

Opening with POLIS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.65 guesses and ranks #1,681 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.77 guesses at best and is rank #601 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.60, at or below the proven-optimal 3.65, 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
POLIS sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as an uncommon word many players still recognize.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).