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.

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

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.

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 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 82.2% of games, misses completely in 17.8%, and leaves about 155 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.

4.95 Entropy (bits)
155 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.5% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 81% of evaluated openers
0.99 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

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
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.46 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

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
174 answers
110 answers
90 answers
88 answers
73 answers
71 answers
60 answers
51 answers
39 answers
38 answers
36 answers
35 answers
28 answers
27 answers
26 answers
26 answers
25 answers
24 answers
24 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 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.

17.8%
LIANE 6.21 bits
10.4%
LAIDE 5.34 bits
8.3%
TAINT 5.37 bits
7.3%
CLADE 5.16 bits
4.6%
LIANE 5.14 bits
3.8%
GRADE 4.42 bits
3.7%
TIARE 4.93 bits
3.1%
PLAIN 4.98 bits
3.0%
MASSE 4.84 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.

How it sounds

One syllable Say it STRAHP. Estimated pronunciation

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

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, STROP is a kind of strap or sharpen.

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); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).