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

POOFY

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

As an opener, it rules out about 79.1% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈpuːfi//ˈpʊfi/

Adjective

Of or pertaining to something that is puffy, filled with air, inflated.

Adjective

Capable of making a poofing sound.

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 POOFY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts POOFY 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 57.2% of games, misses completely in 42.8%, and leaves about 495 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #13,489 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.87 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 POOFY 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.

3.44 Entropy (bits)
495 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
79.1% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 6% of evaluated openers
2.51 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How POOFY 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.

3.87 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#13,489 Rank among openers
Opening with POOFY 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 3.87 average. It ranks #13,489 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
28
3 guesses
662
4 guesses
1,279
5 guesses
360
6 guesses
23
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:
O

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
57%
Green tile
39%
All gray
43%

Feedback distribution

POOFY can come back 56 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

1015 answers
206 answers
155 answers
138 answers
133 answers
131 answers
105 answers
79 answers
41 answers
33 answers
26 answers
25 answers
25 answers
21 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers
6 answers
6 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3O1O1F4Y4
Total: 13 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

Strategy after playing POOFY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing POOFY:

43% chance
Suggested:
TIARE
9% chance
Suggested:
SLART
7% chance
Suggested:
CRUET

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

42.8%
TIARE 6.21 bits
8.7%
SLART 4.81 bits
6.5%
CRUET 4.83 bits
5.8%
CANER 5.28 bits
5.6%
CRATE 4.95 bits
5.5%
SATER 5.48 bits
4.4%
ARIEL 5.39 bits
3.3%
LIANE 5.16 bits
1.7%
DROLE 3.36 bits
1.4%
CARLE 4.66 bits

Research on POOFY

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

Optimal play

Opening with POOFY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.86 guesses and ranks #13,088 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.03 guesses at best and is rank #6,522 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.87, at or below the proven-optimal 3.86, 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 POOFEE. Estimated pronunciation

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

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
POOFY 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.

In a sentence

Layla's hair was so poofy.
© tatoeba.org contributor OsoHombre (CC BY 2.0 FR)
Rima's hair was poofy like a lion's.
© tatoeba.org contributor Amastan (CC BY 2.0 FR)

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 frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).