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

SMUSH

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

As an opener, it rules out about 79.5% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /smʌʃ//smʊʃ/

Noun

A beaten or pulverized mass.

“The steamroller left her pie an unrecognizable smush.”

Noun

An act of crushing or squeezing.

Verb

To mash or push down or in; compress

“His favorite part of making preserves with his mother was when he got to smush the raw fruit with the pestle.”

Verb

To engage in intimate contact, especially sexual relations.

Alternative forms: smoosh

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 SMUSH performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SMUSH 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 57.5% of games, misses completely in 42.5%, and leaves about 487 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #12,278 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.82 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 SMUSH 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.

3.55 Entropy (bits)
487 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
79.5% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 8% of evaluated openers
2.40 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SMUSH 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.

3.82 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.73 Spread of game lengths
#12,278 Rank among openers
Opening with SMUSH left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.73 means those games clustered within about 0.73 of a guess of the 3.82 average. It ranks #12,278 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
41
3 guesses
718
4 guesses
1,252
5 guesses
309
6 guesses
32
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

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
SU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
58%
Green tile
32%
All gray
42%

Feedback distribution

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

1008 answers
215 answers
170 answers
151 answers
130 answers
77 answers
72 answers
71 answers
50 answers
48 answers
30 answers
29 answers
23 answers
22 answers
20 answers
19 answers
15 answers
13 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
10 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
7 answers
7 answers
5 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1M3U1S1H4
Total: 10 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing SMUSH

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SMUSH:

42% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL
9% chance
Suggested:
PLANE
7% chance
Suggested:
RAILE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

42.5%
ARIEL 6.15 bits
9.1%
PLANE 5.40 bits
7.2%
RAILE 4.89 bits
6.4%
MORAE 5.42 bits
5.5%
TIARE 5.68 bits
3.2%
TRONE 4.85 bits
3.0%
IRATE 4.67 bits
3.0%
ROATE 5.05 bits
2.1%
TALER 4.90 bits
2.0%
RAILE 4.35 bits

Research on SMUSH

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

Optimal play

Opening with SMUSH, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.87 guesses and ranks #13,225 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.01 guesses at best and is rank #6,286 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.82, at or below the proven-optimal 3.87, 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

One syllable Say it SMUHSH. Estimated pronunciation

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

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
SMUSH 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.

In a sentence

Everyone smush together so I can take a picture.
© tatoeba.org contributor shekitten (CC BY 2.0 FR)

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).