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

RUING

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Verb

present participle and gerund of rue

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

Related meanings

Synonyms regret sorrow repent

In a sentence

Mark asked Jessica to ruing Skura's wedding.
© tatoeba.org contributor Amastan (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use RUING in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 91.3% 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 RUING performs as a guess

Wordle accepts RUING 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 77.9% of games, misses completely in 22.1%, and leaves about 208 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #2,864 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.63 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 RUING 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.

4.61 Entropy (bits)
208 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
91.3% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How RUING 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.

3.63 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#2,864 Rank among openers
Opening with RUING 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 3.63 average. It ranks #2,864 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
55
3 guesses
960
4 guesses
1,145
5 guesses
175
6 guesses
18

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
INRU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
78%
Green tile
28%
All gray
22%

Feedback distribution

RUING can come back 97 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

527 answers
357 answers
149 answers
127 answers
98 answers
93 answers
65 answers
64 answers
59 answers
57 answers
54 answers
53 answers
44 answers
43 answers
42 answers
40 answers
31 answers
27 answers
25 answers
23 answers
21 answers
19 answers
19 answers
19 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

R1U1I1N1G2
Total: 6 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing RUING

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing RUING:

22% chance
Suggested:
SLATE
15% chance
Suggested:
COATE
6% chance
Suggested:
TILDE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

22.1% →
SLATE 6.49 bits
15.0% →
COATE 5.55 bits
6.2% →
TILDE 5.03 bits
5.3% →
SAMEL 5.13 bits
4.1% →
CLOSE 5.25 bits
3.9% →
SLATE 5.14 bits
2.7% →
PRATE 4.32 bits
2.7% →
SADLY 4.16 bits
2.5% →
CADET 4.22 bits
2.4% →
ALOSE 5.21 bits

Research on RUING

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

Optimal play

Opening with RUING, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.71 guesses and ranks #5,592 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.84 guesses at best and is rank #2,551 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.63, at or below the proven-optimal 3.71, 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
RUING 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.
Dominant sense
Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with internal bodily sensation (2.3 of 5).

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).