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

STUDS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of stud

Noun

A pair of shoes or boots which have studs on the bottom to aid grip.

“He wore his studs to play soccer.”

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

How it sounds

One syllable Say it STUHDZ.

Rhymes with SPUDS SCUDS

Related meanings

Synonyms dot

In a sentence

Take those football boots off, now, otherwise the studs will ruin the parquet flooring!
© tatoeba.org contributor sundown (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use STUDS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 84.9% 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 STUDS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts STUDS 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 66.4% of games, misses completely in 33.6%, and leaves about 360 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,609 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.77 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 STUDS 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.

3.77 Entropy (bits)
360 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
84.9% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How STUDS 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.

3.77 Avg guesses
99.87% Solved within six
0.67 Spread of game lengths
#10,609 Rank among openers
Opening with STUDS left 3 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.67 means those games clustered within about 0.67 of a guess of the 3.77 average. It ranks #10,609 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
33
3 guesses
743
4 guesses
1,309
5 guesses
253
6 guesses
13

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
STU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
66%
Green tile
26%
All gray
34%

Feedback distribution

STUDS can come back 61 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

801 answers
323 answers
183 answers
176 answers
131 answers
91 answers
63 answers
52 answers
51 answers
50 answers
46 answers
45 answers
39 answers
38 answers
30 answers
20 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
14 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1T1U1D2S1
Total: 6 points

Words With Friends

Total: 7 points

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

Strategy after playing STUDS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing STUDS:

34% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
14% chance
Suggested:
TREAT
8% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

33.6% →
RAILE 6.16 bits
13.5% →
TREAT 5.63 bits
7.7% →
ARIEL 5.75 bits
7.4% →
PLANE 5.29 bits
5.5% →
MARLE 4.84 bits
3.8% →
PARLE 5.20 bits
2.6% →
AROSE 4.62 bits
2.2% →
ALONE 4.26 bits
2.1% →
RAIKE 4.38 bits
2.1% →
CLONE 4.54 bits

Research on STUDS

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

Optimal play

Opening with STUDS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.84 guesses and ranks #12,229 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

No guaranteed hard-mode solve In hard mode, no strategy that opens with STUDS can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.77, at or below the proven-optimal 3.84, 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
STUDS sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 2 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
Dominant sense
Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (4.3 of 5).

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); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).