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

SKUAS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of skua

Verb

third-person singular simple present indicative of skua

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

In a sentence

Skuas are bigger than puffins.
© tatoeba.org contributor Amastan (CC BY 2.0 FR)
Skuas are faster than puffins.
© tatoeba.org contributor Amastan (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use SKUAS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 85.5% 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 SKUAS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SKUAS 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 70.2% of games, misses completely in 29.8%, and leaves about 346 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #13,156 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.85 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 SKUAS 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.

3.74 Entropy (bits)
346 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
85.5% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SKUAS 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.

3.85 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#13,156 Rank among openers
Opening with SKUAS left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.72 means those games clustered within about 0.72 of a guess of the 3.85 average. It ranks #13,156 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
31
3 guesses
694
4 guesses
1,252
5 guesses
348
6 guesses
28

Composition

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ASU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
70%
Green tile
29%
All gray
30%

Feedback distribution

SKUAS can come back 61 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

711 answers
468 answers
176 answers
156 answers
112 answers
80 answers
78 answers
73 answers
70 answers
56 answers
47 answers
30 answers
24 answers
24 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
13 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
9 answers
8 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1K5U1A1S1
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Strategy after playing SKUAS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SKUAS:

30% chance
Suggested:
TOILE
20% chance
Suggested:
CARLE
7% chance
Suggested:
TRICE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

29.8% →
TOILE 5.93 bits
19.6% →
CARLE 5.34 bits
7.4% →
TRICE 4.85 bits
6.5% →
TRIPE 5.08 bits
4.7% →
RATEL 4.74 bits
3.4% →
TRONE 4.78 bits
3.3% →
TORSE 5.14 bits
3.1% →
PLATE 4.33 bits
2.9% →
PRATE 4.81 bits
2.3% →
CRONE 4.88 bits

Research on SKUAS

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

Optimal play

Opening with SKUAS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.88 guesses and ranks #13,539 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.04 guesses at best and is rank #6,707 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.85, at or below the proven-optimal 3.88, 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
SKUAS sits in the rare band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word few players will have met in print.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).