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

TANKY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈtæŋki/[ˈtʰæŋki]/ˈteɪ̯ŋki/

Adjective

Having a dank quality resulting from excessive ageing in a tank.

Adjective

Able to withstand much damage, having a lot of hit points (that is, like a tank).

Noun

A sailor who assists the navigator of the ship; a sailor in charge of the ship's hold, and thus responsible for the provision of rations and water.

Noun

Alternative form of tankie (“a soldier from a tank regiment; a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain”).

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

Etymology

From tank + -y (diminutive suffix). The noun sense is from the fact that the assistant of the navigator of a ship was also in charge of the ship’s water tanks, and later its rations when refrigeration was introduced.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use TANKY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 91.8% of possible answers.

Open Solver with TANKY 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 TANKY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts TANKY 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 78.9% of games, misses completely in 21.1%, and leaves about 196 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #5,721 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.68 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.

T___Y T in the 1st position and Y in the 5th position T__K_ T in the 1st position and K in the 4th position _A__Y A in the 2nd position and Y in the 5th position TA_KY T in the 1st position, A in the 2nd position, K in the 4th position, and Y in the 5th position

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

First-turn measures

All four describe TANKY 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.

4.54 Entropy (bits)
196 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
91.8% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How TANKY 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.

3.68 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#5,721 Rank among openers
Opening with TANKY left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.69 means those games clustered within about 0.69 of a guess of the 3.68 average. It ranks #5,721 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
52
3 guesses
877
4 guesses
1,207
5 guesses
203
6 guesses
14

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ANT

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
79%
Green tile
35%
All gray
21%

Feedback distribution

TANKY can come back 90 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

502 answers
267 answers
221 answers
149 answers
146 answers
109 answers
107 answers
67 answers
67 answers
59 answers
50 answers
47 answers
42 answers
40 answers
32 answers
32 answers
27 answers
24 answers
23 answers
23 answers
23 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
16 answers
15 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

T1A1N1K5Y4
Total: 12 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

Try next

SLIER PEARL SHIER POIRE SOLDE LEAST

Strategy after playing TANKY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing TANKY:

21% chance
Suggested:
SLIER
11% chance
Suggested:
PEARL
9% chance
Suggested:
SHIER

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

21.1% →
SLIER 6.05 bits
11.2% →
PEARL 5.42 bits
9.3% →
SHIER 5.58 bits
6.2% →
POIRE 5.32 bits
6.1% →
SOLDE 4.60 bits
4.6% →
LEAST 4.97 bits
4.5% →
SILER 4.88 bits
2.8% →
GRISE 4.77 bits
2.8% →
SHOER 4.93 bits
2.5% →
CRISE 4.43 bits

Research on TANKY

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

Optimal play

Opening with TANKY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.72 guesses and ranks #6,404 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.87 guesses at best and is rank #3,403 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.68, at or below the proven-optimal 3.72, 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
TANKY 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).