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

SOLED

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

As an opener, it rules out about 95.5% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Adjective

Having a specified kind of sole.

“a rubber-soled shoe”

Verb

simple past and past participle of sole

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 SOLED performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SOLED 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 87.8% of games, misses completely in 12.2%, and leaves about 106 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #1,509 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.61 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 SOLED 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.

5.30 Entropy (bits)
106 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
95.5% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 95% of evaluated openers
0.65 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SOLED 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.

3.61 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#1,509 Rank among openers
Opening with SOLED 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 3.61 average. It ranks #1,509 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
73
3 guesses
950
4 guesses
1,167
5 guesses
150
6 guesses
14
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.45 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ELOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
88%
Green tile
43%
All gray
12%

Feedback distribution

SOLED can come back 111 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

288 answers
235 answers
133 answers
129 answers
109 answers
107 answers
100 answers
83 answers
76 answers
62 answers
58 answers
56 answers
52 answers
46 answers
45 answers
39 answers
38 answers
37 answers
33 answers
27 answers
26 answers
24 answers
21 answers
21 answers
21 answers
18 answers
18 answers
18 answers
18 answers
16 answers

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SOLED:

12% chance
Suggested:
CAIRN
10% chance
Suggested:
REATE
6% chance
Suggested:
RAINY

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

12.2%
CAIRN 5.95 bits
10.0%
REATE 5.56 bits
5.6%
RAINY 4.79 bits
5.5%
APRON 5.11 bits
4.6%
EATER 4.43 bits
4.5%
STARK 4.49 bits
4.2%
GRATE 4.58 bits
3.5%
TORCH 4.39 bits
3.2%
TRASH 4.63 bits
2.6%
PEART 4.42 bits

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1O1L1E1D2
Total: 6 points

Words With Friends

Total: 7 points

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

The science of SOLED

What game-tree analysis and word research measure about SOLED — each figure with what it means.

Optimal play

Opening with SOLED, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.61 guesses — rank #294 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 SOLED can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.61 — at or below the proven-optimal 3.61 only 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) — not the site's working answer pool.

How it sounds

One syllable — say it SOHLD. Estimated pronunciation

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

How people know it

Frequency
SOLED sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English — an uncommon word many players still recognize.
Dominant sense
People report experiencing what it names mainly by sight (visual strength 3.1 of 5 in the Lancaster norms).

In a sentence

Wear flat, rubber-soled shoes.
© tatoeba.org contributor Hybrid (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); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).