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

RUFFY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Proper noun

A locality in the Shire of Murrindindi, And Theshire of Strathbogie, north eastern Victoria, Australia.

Proper noun

A surname.

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

Use RUFFY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 81.0% 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 RUFFY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts RUFFY 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 63.9% of games, misses completely in 36.1%, and leaves about 452 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #14,098 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.91 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 RUFFY 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.

3.33 Entropy (bits)
452 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
81.0% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How RUFFY 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.

3.91 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#14,098 Rank among openers
Opening with RUFFY 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 3.91 average. It ranks #14,098 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
29
3 guesses
606
4 guesses
1,292
5 guesses
401
6 guesses
24

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
RU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
64%
Green tile
27%
All gray
36%

Feedback distribution

RUFFY can come back 53 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

861 answers
489 answers
205 answers
158 answers
89 answers
67 answers
63 answers
56 answers
52 answers
51 answers
43 answers
31 answers
31 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
13 answers
11 answers
8 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers
5 answers
5 answers
5 answers
5 answers
5 answers
4 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

R1U1F4F4Y4
Total: 14 points

Words With Friends

Total: 14 points

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

Strategy after playing RUFFY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing RUFFY:

36% chance
Suggested:
SLANE
21% chance
Suggested:
STOAE
9% chance
Suggested:
SALET

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

36.1% →
SLANE 6.27 bits
20.5% →
STOAE 5.52 bits
8.6% →
SALET 4.91 bits
6.6% →
STONE 5.22 bits
3.7% →
BLITE 4.68 bits
2.8% →
CRUET 4.71 bits
2.6% →
LIANE 4.48 bits
2.3% →
TARRE 4.24 bits
2.2% →
SLANE 4.90 bits
2.1% →
IRATE 4.60 bits

Research on RUFFY

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

Optimal play

Opening with RUFFY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.94 guesses and ranks #14,329 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.09 guesses at best and is rank #7,069 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.91, at or below the proven-optimal 3.94, 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
RUFFY 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).