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

SILTY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Adjective

Having a noticeable amount of silt.

“The silty river needed its channel dredged periodically to remain navigable.”

Adjective

Resembling or characteristic of silt.

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

Related meanings

Synonyms LOOSE

Opposites compact

Use SILTY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 93.7% 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 SILTY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SILTY 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 81.8% of games, misses completely in 18.2%, and leaves about 151 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #439 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.58 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 SILTY 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.

4.98 Entropy (bits)
151 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.7% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SILTY 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.

3.58 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#439 Rank among openers
Opening with SILTY 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 3.58 average. It ranks #439 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
62
3 guesses
1,040
4 guesses
1,089
5 guesses
149
6 guesses
14

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ILST

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
41%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

SILTY can come back 110 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

435 answers
213 answers
175 answers
147 answers
134 answers
120 answers
76 answers
70 answers
63 answers
63 answers
61 answers
51 answers
41 answers
41 answers
34 answers
33 answers
32 answers
31 answers
29 answers
25 answers
22 answers
22 answers
22 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
19 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1I1L1T1Y4
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 8 points

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

Strategy after playing SILTY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SILTY:

18% chance
Suggested:
CRANE
9% chance
Suggested:
CRANE
7% chance
Suggested:
CARET

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

18.2% →
CRANE 6.23 bits
8.9% →
CRANE 5.37 bits
7.3% →
CARET 5.51 bits
6.2% →
CRANE 5.58 bits
5.6% →
DRONE 4.86 bits
5.0% →
CARNE 5.34 bits
3.2% →
COURE 5.11 bits
2.9% →
TRONE 4.74 bits
2.6% →
CLADE 4.59 bits
2.6% →
RANCE 4.68 bits

Research on SILTY

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

Optimal play

Opening with SILTY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.65 guesses and ranks #1,864 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 SILTY can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.58, at or below the proven-optimal 3.65, 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
SILTY 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); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).