SHALE
SHALE is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ʃeɪl/
- Noun
-
A shell, scale or husk; a cod or pod.
- Noun
-
A fine-grained sedimentary rock of a thin, laminated, and often friable, structure.
- Verb
-
To take off the shell or coat of.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From Middle English schale (“shell, husk; scale”), from Old English sċealu (“shell, husk, pod”), from Proto-West Germanic *skalu, from Proto-Germanic *skalō, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH- (“to split, cut”), from *(s)kel- (“to split, cleave”).
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
One syllable Say it SHAYL.
Rhymes with SCALE EMAIL TRAIL WHALE SNAIL
In a sentence
Shale gas is more expensive than conventional gas.
Has Algeria started mining its shale oil?
Use SHALE in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 96.0% of possible answers.
Wordle status
A word can be a playable guess without being a possible answer.
Playable guess
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
No completed appearanceNo 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.
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See what the public sample says →How SHALE performs as a guess
SHALE is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,384 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 89.3% of games, misses completely in 10.7%, and leaves about 95 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #1,132 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.60 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe SHALE 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.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How SHALE 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.
Composition
Feedback chances
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches SHALE in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
SHALE can come back 133 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for SHALE; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
Try next
Strategy after playing SHALE
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to SHALE.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing SHALE:
Research on SHALE
Game-tree analysis and word research for SHALE, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with SHALE, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.63 guesses and ranks #815 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 SHALE can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.60, at or below the proven-optimal 3.63, 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
- SHALE sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 5 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (3.4 of 5).
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).