SHILL
Yes, SHILL was the Wordle answer on July 21, 2026 (Wordle #1858).
As an opener, it rules out about 88.9% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ʃɪl/
- Noun
-
A person paid to endorse a product while pretending to be impartial.
“carnival barkers and their shills, fleecing the rubes”
- Noun
-
Any person enthusiastically endorsing a product; especially, one who is getting paid for the endorsement.
“On the screen, there was that quack again, playing the shill for yet another drug company.”
- Verb
-
To promote or endorse in return for payment, especially dishonestly; sometimes extended sarcastically even to those not paid but strongly biased in favor.
“That contractor seems to be shilling for a certain brand of building materials.”
- Verb
-
To put under cover; to sheal.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
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
Used oncePast Wordle answer: July 21, 2026 (#1858).
See the full page for that puzzle: July 21, 2026 (#1858).
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 SHILL performs as a guess
SHILL is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,374 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 71.7% of games, misses completely in 28.3%, and leaves about 263 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #6,838 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe SHILL 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 SHILL 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 SHILL in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
SHILL can come back 80 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 SHILL; 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 SHILL
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to SHILL.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing SHILL:
Research on SHILL
Game-tree analysis and word research for SHILL, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with SHILL, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.79 guesses and ranks #10,067 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.92 guesses at best and is rank #4,643 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 3.79, 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.
Related meanings
In WordNet's sense inventory, SHILL is a kind of decoy or deceive.
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- SHILL sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as an uncommon word many players still recognize.
In a sentence
Tom is a shill for Big Oil.
Tom is a shill for the oil industry.
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).