5 FiveLetterWords
Accepted guess Not a possible answer B tier for first-turn info

SHOLA

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

As an opener, it rules out about 94.4% of possible answers.

Open Solver with SHOLA Open Word Finder

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

A wild plant of species Aeschynomene aspera, found in Bengal and Assam, having a milky-white, spongy pith used for the manufacture of pith helmets and decorative artifacts.

Noun

A wooded ravine; a thicket.

Alternative forms: sola, solah

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

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

Not used yet

No past answer date found.

The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.

How SHOLA performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SHOLA 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 85.3% of games, misses completely in 14.7%, and leaves about 133 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #2,127 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.62 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.
See strategy patterns

Useful pattern pages

If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.

S___A S in the 1st position and A in the 5th position S__L_ S in the 1st position and L in the 4th position _H__A H in the 2nd position and A in the 5th position

Explore lists that match the beginning, ending or letters in SHOLA.

First-turn measures

All four describe SHOLA 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.

5.04 Entropy (bits)
133 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
94.4% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 85% of evaluated openers
0.91 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SHOLA 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.

3.62 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#2,127 Rank among openers
Opening with SHOLA solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.62 average. It ranks #2,127 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
67
3 guesses
977
4 guesses
1,109
5 guesses
181
6 guesses
20
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.46 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ALOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
85%
Green tile
34%
All gray
15%

Feedback distribution

SHOLA can come back 104 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

350 answers
274 answers
172 answers
142 answers
123 answers
94 answers
73 answers
72 answers
71 answers
62 answers
59 answers
52 answers
50 answers
44 answers
42 answers
37 answers
37 answers
36 answers
34 answers
32 answers
29 answers
28 answers
24 answers
21 answers
19 answers
19 answers
19 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1H4O1L1A1
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 8 points

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

Try next

TRIED TRINE RONTE RENAL FLIER PEART

Strategy after playing SHOLA

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SHOLA:

15% chance
Suggested:
TRIED
12% chance
Suggested:
TRINE
7% chance
Suggested:
RONTE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

14.7% →
TRIED 5.97 bits
11.5% →
TRINE 5.58 bits
7.2% →
RONTE 5.42 bits
6.0% →
RENAL 4.63 bits
5.2% →
FLIER 4.84 bits
4.0% →
TRINE 5.20 bits
3.1% →
PEART 4.67 bits
3.0% →
URITE 5.05 bits
3.0% →
DRONE 4.11 bits
2.6% →
TRICE 4.63 bits

Research on SHOLA

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

Optimal play

Opening with SHOLA, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.67 guesses and ranks #2,997 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.80 guesses at best and is rank #1,270 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.62, at or below the proven-optimal 3.67, 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.

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it SHOHLUH. Estimated pronunciation

This pronunciation is machine-estimated, not taken from a pronunciation dictionary.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
SHOLA 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.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).