STAVE
STAVE is on the solver's possible-answer list and has no appearance in our globally completed Wordle history.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /steɪv/
- Noun
-
One of a number of narrow strips of wood, or narrow iron plates, placed edge to edge to form the sides, covering, or lining of a vessel or structure; especially, one of the strips which form the sides of a cask, barrel, pail, etc.
- Noun
-
One of the bars or rounds of a rack, rungs of a ladder, etc; one of the cylindrical bars of a lantern wheel
- Verb
-
To fit or furnish with staves or rundles.
- Verb
-
To break in the staves of; to break a hole in; to burst.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
Various origins: * Borrowed from North German Stave, an occupational surname for a judge or church official, from Middle Low German Staf (“staff”). * Borrowed from Norwegian Stave, a habitational surname from five farmsteads in the country. * Americanized form of Polish Staw, a Jewish Ashkenazi surname.
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
One syllable Say it STAYV.
Rhymes with BRAVE GRAVE SLAVE SHAVE CRAVE
Related meanings
In a sentence
I snapped a stave while bell-ringing on Monday.
A win tonight is vital to stave off the threat of relegation.
Use STAVE in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 94.7% of possible answers.
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
No completed appearanceNo 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.
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See what the public sample says →How STAVE performs as a guess
STAVE is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,384 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 85.5% of games, misses completely in 14.5%, and leaves about 127 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #5,832 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.68 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 STAVE 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 STAVE 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 STAVE in 3 guesses.
Feedback distribution
STAVE can come back 101 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 STAVE; 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 STAVE
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to STAVE.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing STAVE:
Research on STAVE
Game-tree analysis and word research for STAVE, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with STAVE, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.71 guesses and ranks #5,330 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.84 guesses at best and is rank #2,525 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.68, at or below the proven-optimal 3.71, 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
- STAVE sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about once per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
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).