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

POODS

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

As an opener, it rules out about 84.5% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of pood

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 POODS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts POODS 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 65.7% of games, misses completely in 34.3%, and leaves about 367 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,988 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 POODS 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.

3.83 Entropy (bits)
367 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
84.5% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 16% of evaluated openers
2.12 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How POODS 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
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#8,988 Rank among openers
Opening with POODS 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 3.74 average. It ranks #8,988 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
46
3 guesses
786
4 guesses
1,271
5 guesses
234
6 guesses
16
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

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
OS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
66%
Green tile
30%
All gray
34%

Feedback distribution

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

815 answers
332 answers
175 answers
139 answers
115 answers
84 answers
80 answers
77 answers
70 answers
49 answers
39 answers
33 answers
32 answers
23 answers
21 answers
19 answers
17 answers
17 answers
15 answers
13 answers
12 answers
10 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers
8 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3O1O1D2S1
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing POODS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing POODS:

34% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
14% chance
Suggested:
STALE
7% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

34.3%
RAILE 6.21 bits
14.0%
STALE 5.63 bits
7.4%
ARIEL 5.58 bits
5.9%
CARLE 4.76 bits
4.8%
MANOR 5.36 bits
3.5%
CRATE 4.75 bits
3.4%
LIANE 5.21 bits
3.2%
ARIEL 5.13 bits
2.9%
STARE 4.86 bits
2.1%
REACT 4.06 bits

Research on POODS

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

Optimal play

Opening with POODS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.78 guesses and ranks #9,895 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 POODS can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.74, at or below the proven-optimal 3.78, 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

One syllable Say it POODZ. Estimated pronunciation

This pronunciation is machine-estimated, not taken from a pronunciation dictionary.

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, POODS is a kind of weight.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
POODS 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), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).