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

SILKS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of silk

Verb

third-person singular simple present indicative of silk

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

How it sounds

One syllable Say it SIHLKS.

Rhymes with MILKS

In a sentence

Mary's new passion was performing on aerial silks.
© tatoeba.org contributor mccarras (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use SILKS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 85.8% 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 SILKS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SILKS 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 67.8% of games, misses completely in 32.2%, and leaves about 339 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,597 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.77 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 SILKS 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.

3.84 Entropy (bits)
339 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
85.8% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SILKS 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.

3.77 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#10,597 Rank among openers
Opening with SILKS left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.77 average. It ranks #10,597 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
38
3 guesses
776
4 guesses
1,239
5 guesses
279
6 guesses
21

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ILS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
68%
Green tile
30%
All gray
32%

Feedback distribution

SILKS can come back 70 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

768 answers
284 answers
233 answers
174 answers
124 answers
122 answers
79 answers
63 answers
53 answers
45 answers
43 answers
31 answers
27 answers
27 answers
27 answers
24 answers
23 answers
17 answers
16 answers
14 answers
14 answers
14 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
9 answers
7 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1I1L1K5S1
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Strategy after playing SILKS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SILKS:

32% chance
Suggested:
ROATE
12% chance
Suggested:
ROATE
10% chance
Suggested:
TRONE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

32.2% →
ROATE 6.18 bits
11.9% →
ROATE 5.40 bits
9.8% →
TRONE 5.64 bits
7.3% →
PARTE 5.54 bits
5.2% →
ROATE 5.55 bits
5.1% →
RONTE 4.85 bits
3.3% →
GLARE 4.56 bits
2.6% →
HAOLE 4.37 bits
2.2% →
CANER 4.76 bits
1.9% →
THALE 4.47 bits

Research on SILKS

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

Optimal play

Opening with SILKS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.82 guesses and ranks #11,667 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.97 guesses at best and is rank #5,689 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.77, at or below the proven-optimal 3.82, 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
SILKS 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); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).