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

POSHO

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

As an opener, it rules out about 83.7% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈpɒʃəʊ//ˈpɔːʃɔː/

Adjective

Posh.

Noun

A posh person.

Noun

A food product made of cornmeal.

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 POSHO performs as a guess

Wordle accepts POSHO 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 386 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,988 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.78 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 POSHO 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.

3.78 Entropy (bits)
386 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
83.7% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 14% of evaluated openers
2.17 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How POSHO 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.

3.78 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#10,988 Rank among openers
Opening with POSHO solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.78 average. It ranks #10,988 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
49
3 guesses
736
4 guesses
1,270
5 guesses
274
6 guesses
25
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)
64%
Green tile
23%
All gray
36%

Feedback distribution

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

862 answers
251 answers
186 answers
150 answers
145 answers
82 answers
76 answers
69 answers
68 answers
48 answers
47 answers
34 answers
32 answers
31 answers
21 answers
20 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
15 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
8 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers
6 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3O1S1H4O1
Total: 10 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Strategy after playing POSHO

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing POSHO:

36% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
11% chance
Suggested:
STALE
8% chance
Suggested:
ALONE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

36.3%
RAILE 6.25 bits
10.6%
STALE 5.59 bits
7.8%
ALONE 5.26 bits
6.3%
CARTE 5.74 bits
6.1%
MARLE 4.77 bits
3.5%
ALINE 5.18 bits
3.2%
SERAL 4.67 bits
2.9%
ARIEL 4.64 bits
2.9%
ARIEL 5.18 bits
2.0%
TIARE 4.46 bits

Research on POSHO

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

Optimal play

Opening with POSHO, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.82 guesses and ranks #11,386 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 POSHO can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.78, at or below the proven-optimal 3.82, 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 POHSHOH. Estimated pronunciation

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

Familiarity and learning

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