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

SCHMO

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ʃməʊ/

Noun

A stupid, obnoxious, pathetic, or otherwise contemptible person; a schmuck.

Noun

Any average Joe; any Joe Schmoe.

“I'm just an average schmo”

Alternative forms: schmoe, shmo, shmoe

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

Etymology

See Joe Schmoe § Etymology; schmo in this sense may well be homonymic to schmo in the sense above.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use SCHMO in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 87.6% 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 SCHMO performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SCHMO 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 70.0% of games, misses completely in 30.0%, and leaves about 296 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #7,052 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.70 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 SCHMO 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.

4.11 Entropy (bits)
296 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
87.6% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SCHMO 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.

3.70 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#7,052 Rank among openers
Opening with SCHMO solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.68 means those games clustered within about 0.68 of a guess of the 3.70 average. It ranks #7,052 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
36
3 guesses
871
4 guesses
1,218
5 guesses
214
6 guesses
15

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
OS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
70%
Green tile
22%
All gray
30%

Feedback distribution

SCHMO can come back 72 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

716 answers
284 answers
178 answers
156 answers
123 answers
91 answers
86 answers
74 answers
58 answers
50 answers
49 answers
48 answers
44 answers
39 answers
31 answers
28 answers
26 answers
21 answers
15 answers
15 answers
15 answers
14 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers
11 answers
11 answers
9 answers
9 answers
8 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1C3H4M3O1
Total: 12 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

Strategy after playing SCHMO

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SCHMO:

30% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
12% chance
Suggested:
TRONE
7% chance
Suggested:
LEANT

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

30.0% →
RAILE 6.28 bits
11.9% →
TRONE 5.23 bits
7.5% →
LEANT 5.42 bits
6.5% →
RAILE 5.50 bits
5.2% →
TARSE 5.51 bits
3.8% →
TARGE 5.41 bits
3.6% →
MAILE 5.25 bits
3.1% →
LIANE 4.66 bits
2.4% →
CRANE 4.60 bits
2.1% →
ARIEL 4.40 bits

Research on SCHMO

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

Optimal play

Opening with SCHMO, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.75 guesses and ranks #8,149 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.86 guesses at best and is rank #3,081 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.70, at or below the proven-optimal 3.75, 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
SCHMO 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).