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

SURFY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Adjective

of a shore, having lots of breaking waves

Adjective

characteristic of surf music

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

Use SURFY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 89.9% 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 SURFY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SURFY 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 75.9% of games, misses completely in 24.1%, and leaves about 241 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #6,502 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.

First-turn measures

All four describe SURFY 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.

4.36 Entropy (bits)
241 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
89.9% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SURFY 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
99.96% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#6,502 Rank among openers
Opening with SURFY left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.69 average. It ranks #6,502 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
52
3 guesses
874
4 guesses
1,184
5 guesses
228
6 guesses
15

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
RSU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
76%
Green tile
39%
All gray
24%

Feedback distribution

SURFY can come back 88 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

574 answers
369 answers
187 answers
149 answers
102 answers
100 answers
70 answers
62 answers
56 answers
56 answers
49 answers
47 answers
40 answers
38 answers
35 answers
31 answers
29 answers
26 answers
26 answers
25 answers
21 answers
17 answers
15 answers
14 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1U1R1F4Y4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing SURFY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SURFY:

24% chance
Suggested:
ALONE
15% chance
Suggested:
CADET
8% chance
Suggested:
PLATE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

24.1% →
ALONE 6.17 bits
15.5% →
CADET 5.33 bits
7.8% →
PLATE 5.52 bits
6.2% →
LAIDE 4.78 bits
4.3% →
CLONE 5.03 bits
4.2% →
HAOLE 5.15 bits
2.9% →
BLITE 4.73 bits
2.6% →
COATE 4.75 bits
2.3% →
CRUET 4.87 bits
2.3% →
THANE 4.63 bits

Research on SURFY

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

Optimal play

Opening with SURFY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.75 guesses and ranks #8,052 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.88 guesses at best and is rank #3,762 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 3.75, 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
SURFY 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).