STALE
Yes, STALE was the Wordle answer on November 6, 2022 (Wordle #505).
As an opener, it rules out about 96.7% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /steɪl/
- Adjective
-
No longer fresh, in reference to food, urine, straw, wounds, etc.
- Adjective
-
No longer fresh, new, or interesting, in reference to ideas and immaterial things; clichéd, hackneyed, dated.
- Noun
-
Something stale; a loaf of bread or the like that is no longer fresh.
- Verb
-
To make stale; to cause to go out of fashion or currency; to diminish the novelty or interest of, particularly by excessive exposure or consumption.
Alternative forms: stele, steal, steel, stail
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
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
Used oncePast Wordle answer: November 6, 2022 (#505).
See the full page for that puzzle: November 6, 2022 (#505).
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
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See what the public sample says →How STALE performs as a guess
STALE is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,374 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 90.4% of games, misses completely in 9.6%, and leaves about 78 possible answers on average.
In the current bounded six-turn policy, it ranks #62 of 182 evaluated openers; exact misses rank first, then average guesses among wins.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #287 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.57 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe STALE 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.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How STALE 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.
Composition
Feedback chances
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches STALE in 3 guesses.
Feedback distribution
STALE can come back 143 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for STALE; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
Try next
Strategy after playing STALE
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to STALE.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing STALE:
Research on STALE
Game-tree analysis and word research for STALE, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with STALE, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.59 guesses and ranks #90 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.71 guesses at best and is rank #49 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.57, at or below the proven-optimal 3.59, 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.
Related meanings
In WordNet's sense inventory, STALE is a kind of make.
Synonyms cold DUSTY bad hard corrupt rotten
Opposites FRESH original
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- STALE sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 3 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Age of acquisition
- Typically learned around age 8, by Glasgow Norms speaker ratings.
- Imageability
- Imageability score: 46 of 100. Raters gave it a middle-range score.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with taste (3.8 of 5).
In a sentence
The air in the hall was stale.
Her works do not become stale.
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Glasgow Norms (CC BY 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).