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

STROP

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /stɹɒp//stɹɑp/

Noun

A strap; more specifically a piece of leather or a substitute (notably canvas), or strip of wood covered with a suitable material, for honing a razor.

Noun

A piece of rope spliced into a circular wreath, and put round a block for hanging it.

Verb

To hone (a razor or knife) with a strop.

“One should strop the razor before each shave.”

Verb

To mark a sequence of letters syntactically as having a special property, such as being a keyword, e.g. by enclosing in apostrophes as in 'foo' or writing in uppercase as in FOO.

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

Etymology

From apostrophe, due to use of apostrophes as single quotation marks to indicate boldface in ALGOL 60. Other methods were used, especially in ALGOL 68, where the earlier matched apostrophes were no longer common, and the term became used more generally for any such method.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use STROP in a puzzle

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

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 STROP performs as a guess

Wordle accepts STROP 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 #410 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.58 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 STROP 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.

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

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How STROP 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.

3.58 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#410 Rank among openers
Opening with STROP left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.68 means those games clustered within about 0.68 of a guess of the 3.58 average. It ranks #410 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
74
3 guesses
1,021
4 guesses
1,088
5 guesses
161
6 guesses
9

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ORST

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
28%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

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

422 answers
246 answers
197 answers
175 answers
110 answers
90 answers
89 answers
75 answers
72 answers
60 answers
51 answers
39 answers
38 answers
37 answers
35 answers
28 answers
27 answers
27 answers
26 answers
25 answers
24 answers
24 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
13 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1T1R1O1P3
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 8 points

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

Strategy after playing STROP

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing STROP:

18% chance
Suggested:
LIANE
10% chance
Suggested:
LAIDE
8% chance
Suggested:
TAINT

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

17.7% →
LIANE 6.21 bits
10.3% →
LAIDE 5.34 bits
8.3% →
TAINT 5.37 bits
7.3% →
CLADE 5.17 bits
4.6% →
LIANE 5.14 bits
3.8% →
GRADE 4.42 bits
3.7% →
TIARE 4.94 bits
3.1% →
PLAIN 4.95 bits
3.0% →
MASSE 4.88 bits
2.5% →
TONAL 4.14 bits

Research on STROP

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

Optimal play

Opening with STROP, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.65 guesses and ranks #1,515 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.73 guesses at best and is rank #160 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.58, at or below the proven-optimal 3.65, 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
STROP sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as an uncommon word many players still recognize.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).