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

RICER

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

A person, especially a Native American, who cultivates and harvests rice.

Noun

A utensil used to extrude soft foods (especially, cooked potato) through holes about the diameter of a grain of rice.

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

In a sentence

The potato ricer, similar to the garlic press, is essential to making lefse.
© tatoeba.org contributor papabear (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use RICER in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 92.7% 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 RICER performs as a guess

Wordle accepts RICER 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 82.1% of games, misses completely in 17.9%, and leaves about 174 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #7,512 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.71 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 RICER 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.

4.64 Entropy (bits)
174 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
92.7% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How RICER 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.

3.71 Avg guesses
99.79% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#7,512 Rank among openers
Opening with RICER left 5 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 3.71 average. It ranks #7,512 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
58
3 guesses
840
4 guesses
1,194
5 guesses
235
6 guesses
22

Composition

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
EIR

Feedback chances

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

Feedback distribution

RICER can come back 95 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

426 answers
312 answers
178 answers
155 answers
121 answers
113 answers
100 answers
92 answers
89 answers
83 answers
62 answers
60 answers
53 answers
51 answers
31 answers
26 answers
25 answers
25 answers
21 answers
20 answers
20 answers
18 answers
18 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

R1I1C3E1R1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 8 points

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

Strategy after playing RICER

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing RICER:

18% chance
Suggested:
SAULT
13% chance
Suggested:
SLATE
7% chance
Suggested:
SLANT

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

17.9% →
SAULT 5.95 bits
13.1% →
SLATE 5.79 bits
7.5% →
SLANT 5.09 bits
6.5% →
SLANT 5.66 bits
5.1% →
ORATE 4.59 bits
4.7% →
SLANT 5.04 bits
4.2% →
SLANT 4.62 bits
3.9% →
SALTY 4.34 bits
3.7% →
SAULT 3.73 bits
3.5% →
SLANE 4.57 bits

Research on RICER

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

Optimal play

Opening with RICER, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.74 guesses and ranks #7,430 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 RICER can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.71, 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
RICER 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 frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).