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

STIVE

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /staɪv/

Noun

The floating dust in a flour mill caused by the operation of grinding.

Verb

Sometimes with up: to compress (something); to cram.

Verb

To stew; to be stifled or suffocated.

Noun

Obsolete form of stew.

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

Etymology

From Middle English stīven, alternative form of stūphen (“to steep (meat in a liquid)”), from Vulgar Latin *extuphāre, *extufāre, *extupāre, from ex- + Ancient Greek τύφω (túphō, “to smoke”). Compare Scots stove (“to stew”) (whence Irish stobh), Old French estuver (“to put into hot water”), and Dutch stoven (“to stew, simmer”).

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use STIVE in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 93.5% of possible answers.

Open Solver with STIVE Open Word Finder

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 STIVE performs as a guess

Wordle accepts STIVE 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 82.3% of games, misses completely in 17.7%, and leaves about 154 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #6,184 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.69 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.
See strategy patterns

Useful pattern pages

If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.

S___E S in the 1st position and E in the 5th position S__V_ S in the 1st position and V in the 4th position _T__E T in the 2nd position and E in the 5th position ST_VE S in the 1st position, T in the 2nd position, V in the 4th position, and E in the 5th position

Explore lists that match the beginning, ending or letters in STIVE.

First-turn measures

All four describe STIVE 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.

4.89 Entropy (bits)
154 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.5% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How STIVE 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.

3.69 Avg guesses
99.87% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#6,184 Rank among openers
Opening with STIVE left 3 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.69 average. It ranks #6,184 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
59
3 guesses
868
4 guesses
1,191
5 guesses
212
6 guesses
21

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
EIST

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
38%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

STIVE can come back 92 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

422 answers
265 answers
158 answers
143 answers
117 answers
115 answers
109 answers
74 answers
73 answers
67 answers
48 answers
41 answers
36 answers
34 answers
32 answers
32 answers
31 answers
31 answers
31 answers
27 answers
26 answers
24 answers
24 answers
23 answers
22 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
20 answers
18 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1T1I1V4E1
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Try next

CORAL RENAL TROUT GRACE NADIR HEART

Strategy after playing STIVE

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing STIVE:

18% chance
Suggested:
CORAL
11% chance
Suggested:
RENAL
7% chance
Suggested:
TROUT

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

17.7% →
CORAL 5.84 bits
11.1% →
RENAL 5.40 bits
6.6% →
TROUT 5.34 bits
6.0% →
GRACE 4.55 bits
4.9% →
NADIR 4.83 bits
4.8% →
HEART 4.75 bits
4.6% →
CLARY 4.85 bits
3.1% →
CLARY 4.57 bits
3.1% →
TRAIT 4.06 bits
2.8% →
CLASH 4.64 bits

Research on STIVE

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

Optimal play

Opening with STIVE, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.71 guesses and ranks #5,774 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.86 guesses at best and is rank #3,072 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.69, 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
STIVE 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).